“How can you be bored when you have such splendid prospects before you?”
“If I have no faith in those prospects, or if they are too much shrouded?”
“Do not talk nonsense,” said the priest. “It would be far more worthy of you and of me that you should open your heart to me. There is now that between us which ought never to have come between us—a secret. This secret has subsisted for sixteen months. You are in love.”
“And what then?”
“A foul hussy called La Torpille——”
“Well?”
“My boy, I told you you might have a mistress, but a woman of rank, pretty, young, influential, a Countess at least. I had chosen Madame d’Espard for you, to make her the instrument of your fortune without scruple; for she would never have perverted your heart, she would have left you free.—To love a prostitute of the lowest class when you have not, like kings, the power to give her high rank, is a monstrous blunder.”
“And am I the first man who had renounced ambition to follow the lead of a boundless passion?”
“Good!” said the priest, stooping to pick up the mouthpiece of the hookah which Lucien had dropped on the floor. “I understand the retort. Cannot love and ambition be reconciled? Child, you have a mother in old Herrera—a mother who is wholly devoted to you——”
“I know it, old friend,” said Lucien, taking his hand and shaking it.