Jean flushed a little.
“What nice young grocer round the corner?” he asked uneasily.
Madame laughed.
“Come! Come!” she said. “There will always be a young grocer round the corner, and you must be graceful about it. You must not want her to keep always single for your sake. I grant it would be more poetic, but it would not be very kind.”
“But of course I don’t,” said Jean hurriedly. “I haven’t the slightest wish—” he stopped a moment—“but I don’t see why we shouldn’t still be friends,” he added.
Madame laughed again.
“There are only two alternatives, I assure you,” she said. “And it’s like the arrogance of youth to imagine you can invent a third. You may marry the little girl, or you may make the simpler arrangement of a man of your class, but in your situation and with her feeling for you—there will be, sooner or later, an arrangement, and an arrangement which will not be easy to explain subsequently to the grocer; and we must always bear that young man in mind.”
Jean was silent for a moment; he was beginning to think differently of Margot; it was as if he already saw her the wife of the grocer. He felt as if he had been a little ridiculous.
“Well, then,” he said. “What should one do?”
“I think one should not remain in her rooms in the first place,” said Madame very softly; “and, in the second, I should persuade Flaubert to give her lessons instead of you.”