“So Malaga has cost us another twenty thousand francs,” cried the countess, some time later, when she discovered this new generosity to Paz. “First, ten thousand, now twenty more,—thirty thousand! the income of which is fifteen hundred! the cost of my box at the Opera, and the whole fortune of many a bourgeois. Oh, you Poles!” she said, gathering some flowers in her greenhouse; “you are really incomprehensible. Why are you not furious with him?”
“Poor Paz is—”
“Poor Paz, poor Paz, indeed!” she cried, interrupting him, “what good does he do us? I shall take the management of the household myself. You can give him the allowance he refused, and let him settle it as he likes with his Circus.”
“He is very useful to us, Clementine. He has certainly saved over forty thousand francs this last year. And besides, my dear angel, he has managed to put a hundred thousand with Nucingen, which a steward would have pocketed.”
Clementine softened down; but she was none the less hard in her feelings to Thaddeus. A few days later, she requested him to come to that boudoir where, one year earlier, she had been surprised into comparing him with her husband. This time she received him alone, without perceiving the slightest danger in so doing.
“My dear Paz,” she said, with the condescending familiarity of the great to their inferiors, “if you love Adam as you say you do, you will do a thing which he will not ask of you, but which I, his wife, do not hesitate to exact.”
“About Malaga?” said Thaddeus, with bitterness in his heart.
“Well, yes,” she said; “if you wish to end your days in this house and continue good friends with us, you must give her up. How an old soldier—”
“I am only thirty-five, and haven’t a white hair.”
“You look old,” she said, “and that’s the same thing. How so careful a manager, so distinguished a—”