Monsieur George smiled.
“Enterprise, my dear sirs. I am going to get the place tidy. Men do not grow on currant bushes these days, but I have been in Paris and elsewhere.”
“Riff-raff,” said Anatole aggressively.
The “Elephant” looked at him suspiciously with his little eye. He had never been able to understand Durand; he thought him a fool. And, of course, they disliked each other. It would never have occurred to Goblet that these two men had an affection for Beaucourt, an affection that resembled the love of an old man for a daughter, and that they suspected him of being ready to debauch her innocence.
Goblet was a man of platitudes.
“France has to get to work. There is going to be a race for trade.”
“Trade? Of course. One is apt to forget these things. We have got to fill the shop-windows so that silly women may spend money.”
“I make cloth, Monsieur Lefèbre. That is one of life’s necessities, is it not, or would you rather have the women running about naked in the fields?”
“You are unanswerable, monsieur.”
Anatole edged Lefèbre gently out of the conversation, for M. Marcel had a hot temper and a way of losing it with righteous sincerity.