high terms of you, and saying how very
fond you were of my neighbor, M. Goriot. And, indeed, how could you help
loving him? He adores you so passionately that I am jealous already. We
talked about you this morning for two hours. So this evening I was quite
full of all that your father had told me, and while I was dining with my
cousin I said that you could not be as beautiful as affectionate. Mme.
de Beauseant meant to gratify such warm admiration, I think, when she
brought me here, telling me, in her gracious way, that I should see
you."

"Then, even now, I owe you a debt of gratitude, monsieur," said the
banker's wife. "We shall be quite old friends in a little while."

"Although a friendship with you could not be like an ordinary
friendship," said Rastignac; "I should never wish to be your friend."

Such stereotyped phrases as these, in the mouths of beginners, possess
an unfailing charm for women, and are insipid only when read coldly; for
a young man's tone, glance and attitude give a surpassing eloquence to
the banal phrases. Mme. de Nucingen thought that Rastignac was adorable.
Then, woman-like, being at a loss how to reply to the student's
outspoken admiration, she answered a previous remark.

"Yes, it is very wrong of my sister to treat our poor father as she
does," she said; "he has been a Providence to us. It was not until M. de
Nucingen positively ordered me only to receive him in the mornings that
I yielded the point. But I have been unhappy about it for a long while;
I have shed many tears over it. This violence to my feelings, with my
husband's brutal treatment, have been two causes of my unhappy married
life. There is certainly no woman in Paris whose lot seems more enviable
than mine, and yet, in reality, there is not one so much to be pitied.
You will think I must be out of my senses to talk to you like this; but
you know my father, and I cannot regard you as a stranger."

"You will find no one," said Eugene, "who longs as eagerly as I do to be
yours. What do all women seek? Happiness." (He answered his own question
in low, vibrating tones.) "And if happiness for a woman means that she
is to be loved and adored, to have a friend to whom she can pour out her
wishes, her fancies, her sorrows and joys; to whom she can lay bare
her heart and soul, and all her fair defects and her gracious virtues,
without fear of a betrayal; believe me, the devotion and the warmth that
never fails can only be found in