“At length Godefroid discovered a great mystery in Malvina.  Whenever du Tillet knocked at the door, the live red that colored Malvina’s face said ‘Ferdinand!’ When the poor girl’s eyes fell on that two-footed tiger, they lighted up like a brazier fanned by a current of air.  When Ferdinand drew her away to the window or a side table, she betrayed her secret infinite joy.  It is a rare and wonderful thing to see a woman so much in love that she loses her cunning to be strange, and you can read her heart; as rare (dear me!) in Paris as the Singing Flower in the Indies.  But in spite of a friendship dating from the d’Aldriggers’ first appearance at the Nucingens’, Ferdinand did not marry Malvina.  Our ferocious friend was not apparently jealous of Desroches, who paid assiduous court to the young lady; Desroches wanted to pay off the rest of the purchase-money due for his connection; Malvina could not well have less than fifty thousand crowns, he thought, and so the lawyer was fain to play the lover.  Malvina, deeply humiliated as she was by du Tillet’s carelessness, loved him too well to shut the door upon him.  With her, an enthusiastic, highly-wrought, sensitive girl, love sometimes got the better of pride, and pride again overcame wounded love.  Our friend Ferdinand, cool and self-possessed, accepted her tenderness, and breathed the atmosphere with the quiet enjoyment of a tiger licking the blood that dyes his throat.  He would come to make sure of it with new proofs; he never allowed two days to pass without a visit to the Rue Joubert.

“At that time the rascal possessed something like eighteen hundred thousand francs; money must have weighted very little with him in the question of marriage; and he had not merely been proof against Malvina, he had resisted the Barons de Nucingen and de Rastignac; though both of them had set him galloping at the rate of seventy-five leagues a day, with outriders, regardless of expense, through mazes of their cunning devices—­and with never a clue of thread.

“Godefroid could not refrain from saying a word to his future sister-in-law as to her ridiculous position between a banker and an attorney.

“‘You mean to read me a lecture on the subject of Ferdinand,’ she said frankly, ’to know the secret between us.  Dear Godefroid, never mention this again.  Ferdinand’s birth, antecedents, and fortune count for nothing in this, so you may think it is something extraordinary.’  A few days afterwards, however, Malvina took Godefroid apart to say, ‘I do not think that Desroches is sincere’ (such is the instinct of love); ’he would like to marry me, and he is paying court to some tradesman’s daughter as well.  I should very much like to know whether I am a second shift, and whether marriage is a matter of money with him.’  The fact was that Desroches, deep as he was, could not make out du Tillet, and was afraid that he might marry Malvina.  So the fellow had secured his retreat.  His position was intolerable, he was scarcely paying his expenses and interest on the debt.  Women understand nothing of these things; for them, love is always a millionaire.”