“You are letting that lawyer get too much foothold in your house; he kept the ball in his own hands all the evening.”

“Thank you, my friend; forewarned is forearmed,” replied Thuillier, inwardly scoffing at Colleville.

Theodose, who was talking at the moment to Madame Colleville, had his eye on the two men, and, with the same prescience by which women know when and how they are spoken of, he perceived that Colleville was trying to injure him in the mind of the weak and silly Thuillier.  “Madame,” he said in Flavie’s ear, “if any one here is capable of appreciating you it is certainly I. You seem to me a pearl dropped into the mire.  You say you are forty-two, but a woman is no older than she looks, and many women of thirty would be thankful to have your figure and that noble countenance, where love has passed without ever filling the void in your heart.  You have given yourself to God, I know, and I have too much religion myself to regret it, but I also know that you have done so because no human being has proved worthy of you.  You have been loved, but you have never been adored—­I have divined that.  There is your husband, who has not known how to please you in a position in keeping with your deserts.  He dislikes me, as if he thought I loved you; and he prevents me from telling you of a way that I think I have found to place you in the sphere for which you were destined.  No, madame,” he continued, rising, “the Abbe Gondrin will not preach this year through Lent at our humble Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas; the preacher will be Monsieur d’Estival, a compatriot of mine, and you will hear in him one of the most impressive speakers that I have ever known,—­a priest whose outward appearance is not agreeable, but, oh! what a soul!”

“Then my desire will be gratified,” said poor Madame Thuillier.  “I have never yet been able to understand a famous preacher.”

A smile flickered on the lips of Mademoiselle Thuillier and several others who heard the remark.

“They devote themselves too much to theological demonstration,” said Theodose.  “I have long thought so myself—­but I never talk religion; if it had not been for Madame de Colleville, I—­”

“Are there demonstrations in theology?” asked the professor of mathematics, naively, plunging headlong into the conversation.

“I think, monsieur,” replied Theodose, looking straight at Felix Phellion, “that you cannot be serious in asking me such a question.”

“Felix,” said old Phellion, coming heavily to the rescue of his son, and catching a distressed look on the pale face of Madame Thuillier, —­“Felix separates religion into two categories; he considers it from the human point of view and the divine point of view,—­tradition and reason.”

“That is heresy, monsieur,” replied Theodose.  “Religion is one; it requires, above all things, faith.”

Old Phellion, nonplussed by that remark, nodded to his wife:—­