“But I myself was married with only twenty thousand francs for my portion—­”

“In 1819, cousin.  And it was you, a woman with a head on your shoulders, and the royal protection of Louis XVIII.”

“Be still, my child is a perfect angel.  She is clever, she has a warm heart, she will have a hundred thousand francs on her wedding day, to say nothing of the most brilliant expectations; and yet she stays on our hands,” and so on and so on.  For twenty minutes, Mme. de Marville talked on about herself and her Cecile, pitying herself after the manner of mothers in bondage to marriageable daughters.

Pons had dined at the house every week for twenty years, and Camusot de Marville was the only cousin he had in the world; but he had yet to hear the first word spoken as to his own affairs—­nobody cared to know how he lived.  Here and elsewhere the poor cousin was a kind of sink down which his relatives poured domestic confidences.  His discretion was well known; indeed, was he not bound over to silence when a single imprudent word would have shut the door of ten houses upon him?  And he must combine his role of listener with a second part; he must applaud continually, smile on every one, accuse nobody, defend nobody; from his point of view, every one must be in the right.  And so, in the house of his kinsman, Pons no longer counted as a man; he was a digestive apparatus.

In the course of a long tirade, Mme. Camusot de Marville avowed with due circumspection that she was prepared to take almost any son-in-law with her eyes shut.  She was even disposed to think that at eight-and-forty or so a man with twenty thousand francs a year was a good match.

“Cecile is in her twenty-third year.  If it should fall out so unfortunately that she is not married before she is five or six-and-twenty, it will be extremely hard to marry her at all.  When a girl reaches that age, people want to know why she has been so long on hand.  We are a good deal talked about in our set.  We have come to the end of all the ordinary excuses—­’She is so young.—­She is so fond of her father and mother that she doesn’t like to leave them.—­She is so happy at home.—­She is hard to please, she would like a good name—­’ We are beginning to look silly; I feel that distinctly.  And besides, Cecile is tired of waiting, poor child, she suffers—­”

“In what way?” Pons was noodle enough to ask.

“Why, because it is humiliating to her to see all her girl friends married before her,” replied the mother, with a duenna’s air.

“But, cousin, has anything happened since the last time that I had the pleasure of dining here?  Why do you think of men of eight-and-forty?” Pons inquired humbly.