This solemn deliberation he did not conceal; he rubbed his hands over his head, displacing the cap which covered its disastrous baldness.  Suzanne, meantime, like all those persons who succeed beyond their hopes, was silent and amazed.  To hide her astonishment, she assumed the melancholy pose of an injured girl at the mercy of her seducer; inwardly she was laughing like a grisette at her clever trick.

“My dear child,” said du Bousquier at length, “I’m not to be taken in with such bosh, not I!”

Such was the curt remark which ended du Bousquier’s meditation.  He plumed himself on belonging to the class of cynical philosophers who could never be “taken in” by women,—­putting them, one and all, unto the same category, as suspicious.  These strong-minded persons are usually weak men who have a special catechism in the matter of womenkind.  To them the whole sex, from queens of France to milliners, are essentially depraved, licentious, intriguing, not a little rascally, fundamentally deceitful, and incapable of thought about anything but trifles.  To them, women are evil-doing queens, who must be allowed to dance and sing and laugh as they please; they see nothing sacred or saintly in them, nor anything grand; to them there is no poetry in the senses, only gross sensuality.  Where such jurisprudence prevails, if a woman is not perpetually tyrannized over, she reduces the man to the condition of a slave.  Under this aspect du Bousquier was again the antithesis of the chevalier.  When he made his final remark, he flung his night-cap to the foot of the bed, as Pope Gregory did the taper when he fulminated an excommunication; Suzanne then learned for the first time that du Bousquier wore a toupet covering his bald spot.

“Please to remember, Monsieur du Bousquier,” she replied majestically, “that in coming here to tell you of this matter I have done my duty; remember that I have offered you my hand, and asked for yours; but remember also that I behaved with the dignity of a woman who respects herself.  I have not abased myself to weep like a silly fool; I have not insisted; I have not tormented you.  You now know my situation.  You must see that I cannot stay in Alencon:  my mother would beat me, and Madame Lardot rides a hobby of principles; she’ll turn me off.  Poor work-girl that I am, must I go to the hospital? must I beg my bread?  No!  I’d rather throw myself into the Brillante or the Sarthe.  But isn’t it better that I should go to Paris?  My mother could find an excuse to send me there,—­an uncle who wants me, or a dying aunt, or a lady who sends for me.  But I must have some money for the journey and for—­you know what.”

This extraordinary piece of news was far more startling to du Bousquier than to the Chevalier de Valois.  Suzanne’s fiction introduced such confusion into the ideas of the old bachelor that he was literally incapable of sober reflection.  Without this agitation and without his inward delight (for vanity is a swindler which never fails of its dupe), he would certainly have reflected that, supposing it were true, a girl like Suzanne, whose heart was not yet spoiled, would have died a thousand deaths before beginning a discussion of this kind and asking for money.