return soon. You
will wait for her, won't you?"

"Yes, if she is not too long."

"Oh, how insolent! Too long, with me! You treat me like a child."

"No, not so much as you think," he replied.

He felt in his heart a longing to please her, to be gallant and witty,
as in the most successful days of his youth, one of those instinctive
desires that excite all the faculties of charming, that make the peacock
spread its tail and the poet write verses. Quick and vivacious phrases
rose to his lips, and he talked as he knew how to talk when he was at
his best. The young girl, animated by his vivacity, answered him with
all the mischief and playful shrewdness that were in her.

Suddenly, while he was discussing an opinion, he exclaimed: "But you
have already said that to me often, and I answered you--"

She interrupted him with a burst of laughter.

"Ah, you don't say '_tu_' to me any more! You take me for mamma!"

He blushed and was silent, then he stammered:

"Your mother has already sustained that opinion with me a hundred
times."

His eloquence was extinguished; he knew no more what to say, and he now
felt afraid, incomprehensibly afraid, of this little girl.

"Here is mamma," said she.

She had heard the door open in the outer drawing-room, and Olivier,
disturbed as if some one had caught him in a fault, explained how he
had suddenly bethought him of his promise, and had come for them to take
them to the jeweler's.

"I have a coupe," said he. "I will take the bracket seat."

They set out, and a little later they entered Montara's.

Having passed all his life in the intimacy, observation, study, and
affection of women, having always occupied his mind with them, having
been obliged to sound and discover their tastes, to know the details
of dress and fashion as they knew them, being familiar with the minute
details of their private life, he had arrived at a point that
enabled him often to share certain of their sensations, and he always
experienced, when entering one of the great shops where the charming
and delicate accessories of their beauty are to be found, an emotion
of pleasure that almost equaled that which stirred their hearts. He
interested himself as they did in those coquettish trifles with which
they set forth their beauty; the stuffs pleased his eyes; the laces
attracted his hands; the most insignificant furbelows held his
attention. In jewelers' shops he felt for the showcases a sort of
religiou