“Allow me to pity that future lapidary.”

Madame de Malouet tapped the carpet with her foot, and manifested other signs of impatience, which I knew not at first how to interpret, for she is never out of humor; but suddenly a thought, which I took for a luminous one, occurred in my mind; I had no doubt that I had at last discovered the weak side and the only failing in that charming old woman.  She was possessed with the mania of match making, and, in her Christian anxiety to snatch the Little Countess from the abyss of perdition, she was secretly meditating to hurl me into it with her, unworthy though I be.  Penetrated with this modest conviction, I kept upon a defensive that seems to me, at the present moment, perfectly ridiculous.

“Mon Dieu!” said Madame de Malouet, “because you doubt her learning!”

“I do not doubt her learning,” I said; “I doubt whether she knows how to read.”

“But, in short, what fault do you find with her?” rejoined Madame de Malouet in a singularly agitated tone of voice.

I determined to demolish, at a single stroke, the matrimonial dream with which I supposed the marchioness to be deluding herself.

“I find fault with her,” I replied, “for giving to the world the spectacle, supremely irritating even for a profane being like me, of triumphant nullity and haughty vice.  I am not worth much, it’s true, and I have no right to judge, but there is in me, as well as in any theatrical audience, a certain sentiment of reason and morality that rises in indignation in presence of personages wholly devoid of common-sense or virtue, and that protests against their triumph.”

The old lady’s indignation seemed to increase.

“Do you think I would receive her, if she deserved all the stones which slander casts at her?”

“I think it is impossible for you to believe any evil.”

“Bah!  I assure you that you do not show in this case any evidence of penetration.  These love-stories which are attributed to her are so little like her!  She is a child who does not even know what it is to love!”

“I am convinced of that, madame.  Her commonplace coquetry is sufficient evidence of that.  I am even ready to swear that the allurements of the imagination or the impulses of passion are wholly foreign to her errors, which thus remain without excuse.”

“Oh! mon Dieu!” exclaimed Madame de Malouet, clasping her hands, “do hush! she is a poor, forsaken child!  I know her better than you do.  I assure you that beneath her appearance—­much too frivolous, I admit—­she possesses in fact as much heart as she does sense.”

“That is precisely what I think, madam; as much one of as of the other.”

“Ah! that is really intolerable,” murmured Madame de Malouet, dropping her arms in a disconsolate manner.

At the same moment, I saw the curtain that half covered the door by the side of which we sat shake violently, and the Little Countess, leaving the hiding-place where she had been confined by the exigencies of I know not what game, showed herself to us for a moment in the aperture of the door, and returned to join the group of players that stood in the adjoining parlor.  I looked at Madame de Malouet: