“I know you would; I told him so. He hid everything from my mother, and confided only in me.”
“You spoke to him of me?” said Popinot; “you have read my heart? Have you read all that is there?”
“Perhaps.”
“I am very happy,” said Popinot. “If you would lighten all my fears—in a year I shall be so prosperous that your father cannot object when I speak to him of our marriage. From henceforth I shall sleep only five hours a night.”
“Do not injure yourself,” said Cesarine, with an inexpressible accent and a look in which Popinot was suffered to read her thoughts.
“Wife,” said Cesar, as they rose from table, “I think those young people love each other.”
“Well, so much the better,” said Constance, in a grave voice; “my daughter will be the wife of a man of sense and energy. Talent is the best dower a man can offer.”
She left the room hastily and went to Madame Ragon’s bedchamber. Cesar during the dinner had make various fatuous remarks, which caused the judge and Pillerault to smile, and reminded the unhappy woman of how unfitted her poor husband was to grapple with misfortune. Her heart was full of tears; and she instinctively dreaded du Tillet, for every mother knows the Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes, even if she does not know Latin. Constance wept in the arms of Madame Ragon and her daughter, though she would not tell them the cause of her distress.
“I’m nervous,” she said.
The rest of the evening was spent by the elders at the card-table, and by the young people in those little games called innocent because they cover the innocent by-play of bourgeois love. The Matifats joined in these games.