“Ah, my dear Ernest,” said Truth, “you never would have read that lesson to a rich heiress.  No, my boy; you would have gone in hot haste to Havre to find out if the girl were handsome, and you would have been very unhappy indeed at her preference for genius; and if you could have tripped up your friend and supplanted him in her affections, Mademoiselle d’Este would have been a divinity.”

“What?” cried Justice, “are you not always bemoaning yourselves, you penniless men of wit and capacity, that rich girls marry beings whom you wouldn’t take as your servants?  You rail against the materialism of the century which hastens to join wealth to wealth, and never marries some fine young man with brains and no money to a rich girl.  What an outcry you make about it; and yet here is a young woman who revolts against that very spirit of the age, and behold! the poet replies with a blow at her heart!”

“Rich or poor, young or old, ugly or handsome, the girl is right; she has sense and judgment, she has tripped you over into the slough of self-interest and lets you know it,” cried Honor.  “She deserves an answer, a sincere and loyal and frank answer, and, above all, the honest expression of your thought.  Examine yourself! sound your heart and purge it of its meannesses.  What would Moliere’s Alceste say?”

And La Briere, having started from the boulevard Poissoniere, walked so slowly, absorbed in these reflections, that he was more than an hour in reaching the boulevard des Capucines.  Then he followed the quays, which led him to the Cour des Comptes, situated in that time close to the Saint-Chapelle.  Instead of beginning on the accounts as he should have done, he remained at the mercy of his perplexities.

“One thing is evident,” he said to himself; “she hasn’t six millions; but that’s not the point—­”

Six days later, Modeste received the following letter: 

Mademoiselle,—­You are not a D’Este.  The name is a feigned one to conceal your own.  Do I owe the revelations which you solicit to a person who is untruthful about herself?  Question for question:  Are you of an illustrious family? or a noble family? or a middle-class family?  Undoubtedly ethics and morality cannot change; they are one:  but obligations vary in the different states of life.  Just as the sun lights up a scene diversely and produces differences which we admire, so morality conforms social duty to rank, to position.  The peccadillo of a soldier is a crime in a general, and vice-versa.  Observances are not alike in all cases.  They are not the same for the gleaner in the field, for the girl who sews at fifteen sous a day, for the daughter of a petty shopkeeper, for the young bourgoise, for the child of a rich merchant, for the heiress of a noble family, for a daughter of the house of Este.  A king must not stoop to pick up a piece of gold, but a laborer ought to retrace his steps to find ten sous; though both are equally bound to obey