“Ah, Modeste, how can you think it?” said Canalis, striking a dramatic attitude. “Do you think me capable of marrying you only for your money?”
“If I do you that wrong after your edifying remarks on the banks of the Seine can you easily undeceive me,” she said, annihilating him with her scorn.
“Ah!” thought the poet, as he followed her into the house, “if you think, my little girl, that I’m to be caught in that net, you take me to be younger than I am. Dear, dear, what a fuss about an artful little thing whose esteem I value about as much as that of the king of Borneo. But she has given me a good reason for the rupture by accusing me of such unworthy sentiments. Isn’t she sly? La Briere will get a burden on his back—idiot that he is! And five years hence it will be a good joke to see them together.”
The coldness which this altercation produced between Modeste and Canalis was visible to all eyes that evening. The poet went off early, on the ground of La Briere’s illness, leaving the field to the grand equerry. About eleven o’clock Butscha, who had come to walk home with Madame Latournelle, whispered in Modeste’s ear, “Was I right?”
“Alas, yes,” she said.
“But I hope you have left the door half open, so that he can come back; we agreed upon that, you know.”
“Anger got the better of me,” said Modeste. “Such meanness sent the blood to my head and I told him what I thought of him.”
“Well, so much the better. When you are both so angry that you can’t speak civilly to each other I engage to make him desperately in love and so pressing that you will be deceived yourself.”
“Come, come, Butscha; he is a great poet; he is a gentleman; he is a man of intellect.”
“Your father’s eight millions are more to him than all that.”