“Oh! madame!” said Phellion, bowing with an air of respectful dissent.
“But,” continued the lady, “the explanation of my proceeding is very simple. I have studied Celeste, and in that dear and artless child I find a moral weight and value which would make me grieve to see her sacrificed.”
“You are right, madame,” said Madame Phellion. “Celeste is, indeed, an angel of sweetness.”
“As for monsieur Felix, I venture to interest myself because, in the first place, he is the son of so virtuous a father—”
“Oh, madame! I entreat—” said Phellion, bowing again.
“—and he also attracts me by the awkwardness of true love, which appears in all his actions and all his words. We mature women find an inexpressible charm in seeing the tender passion under a form which threatens us with no deceptions and no misunderstandings.”
“My son is certainly not brilliant,” said Madame Phellion, with a faint tone of sharpness; “he is not a fashionable young man.”
“But he has the qualities that are most essential,” replied the countess, “and a merit which ignores itself,—a thing of the utmost consequence in all intellectual superiority—”
“Really, madame,” said Phellion, “you force us to hear things that—”
“That are not beyond the truth,” interrupted the countess. “Another reason which leads me to take a deep interest in the happiness of these young people is that I am not so desirous for that of Monsieur Theodose de la Peyrade, who is false and grasping. On the ruin of their hopes that man is counting to carry out his swindling purposes.”