“That question, my manikin,” she replied, giving him one of the ten or a dozen nicknames she had invented for him, “strikes me as undervaluing the strength of my self-love.”
“Ah, you are laughing, my dear Mademoiselle Modeste; then there’s no danger: I hope you are only making a fool of him.”
“Pray what would you think of me, Monsieur Butscha, if I allowed myself to make fun of those who do me the honor to wish to marry me? You ought to know, master Jean, that even if a girl affects to despise the most despicable attentions, she is flattered by them.”
“Then I flatter you?” said the young man, looking up at her with a face that was illuminated like a city for a festival.
“You?” she said; “you give me the most precious of all friendships,—a feeling as disinterested as that of a mother for her child. Compare yourself to no one; for even my father is obliged to be devoted to me.” She paused. “I cannot say that I love you, in the sense which men give to that word, but what I do give you is eternal and can know no change.”
“Then,” said Butscha, stooping to pick up a pebble that he might kiss the hem of her garment, “suffer me to watch over you as a dragon guards a treasure. The poet was covering you just now with the lace-work of his precious phrases, the tinsel of his promises; he chanted his love on the best strings of his lyre, I know he did. If, as soon as this noble lover finds out how small your fortune is, he makes a sudden change in his behavior, and is cold and embarrassed, will you still marry him? shall you still esteem him?”
“He would be another Francisque Althor,” she said, with a gesture of bitter disgust.
“Let me have the pleasure of producing that change of scene,” said Butscha. “Not only shall it be sudden, but I believe I can change it back and make your poet as loving as before,—nay, it is possible to make him blow alternately hot and cold upon your heart, just as gracefully as he has talked on both sides of an argument in one evening without ever finding it out.”
“If you are right,” she said, “who can be trusted?”
“One who truly loves you.”