try. She merely paid a quota of six hundred francs
a year to the expenses of the household, and this, with her brother's
eighteen hundred, enabled her to make both ends meet at the end of the
year.

From the first days of their coming together, Thuillier listened to his
sister as to an oracle; he consulted her in his trifling affairs, kept
none of his secrets from her, and thus made her taste the fruit of
despotism which was, in truth, the one little sin of her nature. But the
sister had sacrificed everything to the brother; she had staked her all
upon his heart; she lived by him only. Brigitte's ascendancy over Jerome
was singularly proved by the marriage which she procured for him about
the year 1814.

Seeing the tendency to enforced reduction which the new-comers to power
under the Restoration were beginning to bring about in the government
offices, and particularly since the return of the old society which
sought to ride over the bourgeoisie, Brigitte understood, far better
than her brother could explain it to her, the social crisis which
presently extinguished their common hopes. No more successes for that
handsome Thuillier in the salons of the nobles who now succeeded the
plebeians of the Empire!

Thuillier was not enough of a person to take up a politic opinion and
choose a party; he felt, as his sister did for him, the necessity of
profiting by the remains of his youth to make a settlement. In such a
situation, a sister as jealous of her power as Brigitte naturally would,
and ought, to marry her brother, to suit herself as well as to suit him;
for she alone could make him really happy, Madame Thuillier being only
an indispensable accessory to the obtaining of two or three children. If
Brigitte did not have an intellect quite the equal of her will, at least
she had the instinct of her despotism; without, it is true, education,
she marched straight before her, with the headstrong determination of
a nature accustomed to succeed. She had the genius of housekeeping, a
faculty for economy, a thorough understanding of how to live, and a
love for work. She saw plainly that she could never succeed in marrying
Jerome into a sphere above their own, where parents might inquire
into their domestic life and feel uneasy at finding a mistress already
reigning in the home. She therefore sought in a lower grade for persons
to dazzle, and found, almost beside her, a suitable match.

The oldest usher at the Bank, a man named L