Adler's face showed that he neither knew nor suspected anything.
"He actually," continued the pastor, getting still more excited, "he asked her...." He broke off, and exclaimed indignantly: "The insolence! The shame of it!"
"What is the matter with you?" asked Adler, growing anxious. "What did he say to her?"
"He asked her to leave the window of her room open for him at night."
The poor pastor, from the excess of his feelings, flung his panama hat on the floor.
In matters which had nothing to do with the manufacture and sale of cotton goods Adler took a long time to think. The chord that would have been touched by the wrong done to the girl was missing in his heart; but he had a feeling of friendship for the pastor, and starting from this basis and reasoning phlegmatically and logically, he came to the conclusion that, if the young girl had listened to the proposal, Ferdinand would have to marry her. In any case he would have to marry her; the old man saw no other way out of it.
This then was the end of it! A few hours after his arrival, and a few minutes after his excellent speech about his improvement, Ferdinand had put himself into such a position that he, the son of a millionaire, would have to marry a dowerless girl—the pastor's daughter! Instead of enjoying life at his side, and seeing him take the best of what money, youth and unrestrained freedom could give, he would now have to marry the boy to this girl.
It was only after the nervous old Boehme had begun to cry in his anger that Adler's wrath burst out in words.
"He is a scoundrel, that fellow!" he shouted. "A week ago I paid sixty thousand roubles for him, and now he extorts more money from me and behaves like this on the top of it all!"
He lifted his hands and shook them like Moses when he threw down the stone tablets on the heads of the worshippers of the golden calf.