“Good gracious!” cried Thuillier, “I’d like to see any one attempt to meddle with my arrangements!”

“Well, without speaking of Brigitte, I can tell you of another person,” said Theodose, “who is doing that very thing; and that person is Mademoiselle Celeste herself.  In spite of their quarrels about religion, her mind is none the less full of that little Phellion.”

“But why don’t you tell Flavie to put a stop to it?”

“No one knows Flavie, my dear Thuillier, better than you.  She is a woman rather than a mother.  I have found it necessary to do a little bit of courting to her myself, and, you understand, while she is willing for this marriage she doesn’t desire it very much.”

“Well,” said Thuillier, “I’ll undertake to speak to Celeste myself.  It shall never be said that a slip of a girl lays down the law to me.”

“That’s exactly what I don’t want you to do,” cried la Peyrade.  “Don’t meddle in all this.  Outside of your relations to your sister you have an iron will, and I will never have it said that you exerted your authority to put Celeste in my arms; on the contrary, I desire that the child may have complete control over her own heart.  The only thing I request is that she shall decide positively between Felix Phellion and myself; because I do not choose to remain any longer in this doubtful position.  It is true we agreed that the marriage should only take place after you became a deputy; but I feel now that it is impossible to allow the greatest event of my life to remain at the mercy of doubtful circumstances.  And, besides, such an arrangement, though at first agreed upon, seems to me now to have a flavor of a bargain which is unbecoming to both of us.  I think I had better make you a confidence, to which I am led by the unpleasant state of things now between us.  Dutocq may have told you, before you left the apartment in the rue Saint-Dominique, that an heiress had been offered to me whose immediate fortune is larger than that which Mademoiselle Colleville will eventually inherit.  I refused, because I have had the folly to let my heart be won, and because an alliance with a family as honorable as yours seemed to me more desirable; but, after all, it is as well to let Brigitte know that if Celeste refuses me, I am not absolutely turned out into the cold.”

“I can easily believe that,” said Thuillier; “but as for putting the whole decision into the hands of that little girl, especially if she has, as you tell me, a fancy for Felix—­”

“I can’t help it,” said the barrister.  “I must, at any price, get out of this position; it is no longer tenable.  You talk about your pamphlet; I am not in a fit condition to finish it.  You, who have been a man of gallantry, you must know the dominion that women, fatal creatures! exercise over our whole being.”

“Bah!” said Thuillier, conceitedly, “they cared for me, but I did not often care for them; I took them, and left them, you know.”