'You are so much wiser than I,' he always said to her; and when she would have referred to him, replied: 'You have your lawyers; they are all honest men. Consult them rather than me.'
With the affairs of Idrac only he continued to concern himself a little, and was persistent in setting aside all its revenues to accumulate for his second son.
'I wish you cared more about all these things,' she said to him one day, when she had in her hand the reports from the mines of Galicia. He answered angrily, 'I have no right to them. They are not mine. If you chose to give them all away to the Crown I should say nothing.'
'Not even for the children's sake?'
'No: you would be entirely justified if you liked to give the children nothing.'
'I really do not understand you,' she said in great surprise.
'Everything is yours,' he said abruptly.
'And the children too, surely!' she said, with a smile: but the strangeness of the remark disquieted her. 'It is over-sensitiveness,' she thought; 'he can never altogether forget that he was poor. It is for that reason public life would have been so good for him; dignities which he enjoyed of his own, honours that he arrived at through his own attainments.'
Chagrined to have lost, the opportunity of winning personal honours in a field congenial to him, the sense that everything was hers could hardly fail to gall him sometimes constantly, though she strove to efface any remembrance or reminder that it was so.
In the midsummer of that year, whilst they were quite alone, they were surprised by another letter from Mdme. Brancka, in which she proposed to take Hohenszalras on her way from France to Tsarköe Selo, where she was about to pay a visit which could not be declined by her.