“Now this,” thought Emma, “is the dining-room I ought to have.”

The notary came in pressing his palm-leaf dressing-gown to his breast with his left arm, while with the other hand he raised and quickly put on again his brown velvet cap, pretentiously cocked on the right side, whence looked out the ends of three fair curls drawn from the back of the head, following the line of his bald skull.

After he had offered her a seat he sat down to breakfast, apologising profusely for his rudeness.

“I have come,” she said, “to beg you, sir—­”

“What, madame?  I am listening.”

And she began explaining her position to him.  Monsieur Guillaumin knew it, being secretly associated with the linendraper, from whom he always got capital for the loans on mortgages that he was asked to make.

So he knew (and better than she herself) the long story of the bills, small at first, bearing different names as endorsers, made out at long dates, and constantly renewed up to the day, when, gathering together all the protested bills, the shopkeeper had bidden his friend Vincart take in his own name all the necessary proceedings, not wishing to pass for a tiger with his fellow-citizens.

She mingled her story with recriminations against Lheureux, to which the notary replied from time to time with some insignificant word.  Eating his cutlet and drinking his tea, he buried his chin in his sky-blue cravat, into which were thrust two diamond pins, held together by a small gold chain; and he smiled a singular smile, in a sugary, ambiguous fashion.  But noticing that her feet were damp, he said—­

“Do get closer to the stove; put your feet up against the porcelain.”

She was afraid of dirtying it.  The notary replied in a gallant tone—­

“Beautiful things spoil nothing.”

Then she tried to move him, and, growing moved herself, she began telling him about the poorness of her home, her worries, her wants.  He could understand that; an elegant woman! and, without leaving off eating, he had turned completely round towards her, so that his knee brushed against her boot, whose sole curled round as it smoked against the stove.

But when she asked for a thousand sous, he closed his lips, and declared he was very sorry he had not had the management of her fortune before, for there were hundreds of ways very convenient, even for a lady, of turning her money to account.  They might, either in the turf-peats of Grumesnil or building-ground at Havre, almost without risk, have ventured on some excellent speculations; and he let her consume herself with rage at the thought of the fabulous sums that she would certainly have made.

“How was it,” he went on, “that you didn’t come to me?”

“I hardly know,” she said.

“Why, hey?  Did I frighten you so much?  It is I, on the contrary, who ought to complain.  We hardly know one another; yet I am very devoted to you.  You do not doubt that, I hope?”