“It is a loss of two-fifths!”

“Come,” said Cerizet, “you were talking just now of commissions.  I see a means of getting one for you if you’ll engage to batter down this Colleville marriage.  If you will cry it down as you have lately cried it up I shouldn’t despair of getting you a round twenty thousand out of the affair.”

“Then you think that this new proposal will not be agreeable to la Peyrade,—­that he’ll reject it?  Is it some heiress on whom he has already taken a mortgage?”

“All that I can tell you is that these people expect some difficulty in bringing the matter to a conclusion.”

“Well, I don’t desire better than to follow your lead and do what is disagreeable to la Peyrade; but five thousand francs—­think of it!—­it is too much to lose.”

At this moment the door opened, and a waiter ushered in the expected guest.

“You can serve dinner,” said Cerizet to the waiter; “we are all here.”

It was plain that Theodose was beginning to take wing toward higher social spheres; elegance was becoming a constant thought in his mind.  He appeared in a dress suit and varnished shoes, whereas his two associates received him in frock-coats and muddy boots.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I think I am a little late, but that devil of a Thuillier is the most intolerable of human beings about a pamphlet I am concocting for him.  I was unlucky enough to agree to correct the proofs with him, and over every paragraph there’s a fight.  ’What I can’t understand,’ he says, ’the public can’t, either.  I’m not a man of letters, but I’m a practical man’; and that’s the way we battle it, page after page.  I thought the sitting this afternoon would never end.”

“How unreasonable you are, my dear fellow,” said Dutocq; “when a man wants to succeed he must have the courage to make sacrifices.  Once married, you can lift your head.”

“Ah, yes!” said la Peyrade with a sigh, “I’ll lift it; for since the day you made me eat this bread of anguish I’ve become terribly sick of it.”

“Cerizet,” said Dutocq, “has a plan that will feed you more succulently.”

Nothing more was said at the moment, for justice had to be done to the excellent fare ordered by Cerizet in honor of his coming lease.  As usually happens at dinners where affairs are likely to be discussed, each man, with his mind full of them, took pains not to approach those topics, fearing to compromise his advantages by seeming eager; the conversation, therefore, continued for a long time on general subjects, and it was not until the dessert was served that Cerizet brought himself to ask la Peyrade what had been settled about the terms of his lease.

“Nothing, my friend,” replied Theodose.

“What! nothing?  I certainly allowed you time enough to decide the matter.”

“Well, as to that, something is decided.  There will not be any principal tenant at all; Mademoiselle Brigitte is going to let the house herself.”