. He was often aghast when his sister ordered
some article to be sold below cost, foreseeing the end of its fashion;
later he admired her idiotically for her cleverness. He reasoned neither
ill nor well; he was simply incapable of reasoning at all; but he had
the sense to subordinate himself to his sister, and he did so from a
consideration that was outside of the business. "She is my elder," he
said. Perhaps an existence like his, always solitary, reduced to the
satisfaction of mere needs, deprived of money and all pleasures in
youth, may explain to physiologists and thinkers the clownish expression
of the face, the feebleness of mind, the vacant silliness of the man.
His sister had steadily prevented him from marrying, afraid perhaps to
lose her power over him, and seeing only a source of expense and injury
in some woman who would certainly be younger and undoubtedly less ugly
than herself.

Silliness has two ways of comporting itself; it talks, or is silent.
Silent silliness can be borne; but Rogron's silliness was loquacious.
The man had a habit of chattering to his clerks, explaining the minutiae
of the business, and ornamenting his talk with those flat jokes which
may be called the "chaff" of shopkeeping. Rogron, listened to, of
course, by his subordinates and perfectly satisfied with himself, had
come at last into possession of a phraseology of his own. This chatterer
believed himself an orator. The necessity of explaining to customers
what they want, of guessing at their desires, and giving them
desires for what they do not want, exercises the tongue of all retail
shopkeepers. The petty dealer acquires the faculty of uttering words
and sentences in which there is absolutely no meaning, but which have a
marked success. He explains to his customers matters of manufacture that
they know nothing of; that alone gives him a passing superiority over
them; but take him away from his thousand and one explanations about his
thousand and one articles, and he is, relatively to thought, like a fish
out of water in the sun.

Rogron and Sylvie, two mechanisms baptized by mistake, did not possess,
latent or active, the feelings which give life to the heart. Their
natures were shrivelled and harsh, hardened by toil, by privation,
by the remembrance of their sufferings during a long and cruel
apprenticeship to life. Neither of them complained of their trials.
They were not so much implacable as impracticable in their dealings
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