“Still, I don’t see what else you propose to do, my old one.”
Apparently his old one was as poor in expedient as he. “It is for nothing,” she said, acidly, “that one looks to you!”
“I have said my say. If you have anything better to suggest....” He made a rhetorical pause for reply, but Mama Thérèse was well blown and sulky for the moment. “I am not old, not so old as you, and I have reason to believe the girl is not indifferent to my person.”
“Drooling old pig,” Mama Thérèse observed with reason: “if you dream she would trouble to look twice at you—!”
“That remains to be seen. And I, for one, fail to see how else we are to hold her. All this money that has been coming in, paid on the dot every quarter—that means there is more, much more to come to her. Are you ready to give it up?”
“Never!” Mama Thérèse thumped the table vehemently. “It is mine by rights, I have earned it. Look at the way I have slaved for her, the tender care I have lavished upon her, ever since she was a little one in my arms.”
“By all means,” Papa Dupont agreed, “look at it, but don’t talk about it to her. She might not understand you. Also, do not depend upon her to endorse any claim you might set up based upon such assertions.”
“She is an ungrateful baggage!”
“Possibly; but she is human, she has a memory—”
“Are you going to be sentimental about her again?” Mama Thérèse demanded. “Pitiful old goat!”