t insist on too much gold
leaf and too many naked babies on clouds--it's astonishing how women
love naked babies on clouds--it will be the snuggest place in the world.
May I ask for one of your excellent cigarettes?"

I handed him the case from the pocket of the car.

"It was there that I made her acquaintance," he resumed, after having
lit the cigarette from my pipe. "We met, we talked, we fixed it up. She
is not the woman to go by four roads to a thing. She did me the honour
of going straight for me. Ah, but what a wonderful woman! She rules that
cafe like a kingdom; a Semiramis, a Queen Elizabeth, a Catherine de'
Medici. She sits enthroned behind the counter all day long and takes the
money and counts the saucers and smiles on rich clients, and if a waiter
in a far corner gives a bit of sugar to a dog she spots it, and the
waiter has a deuce of a time. That woman is worth her weight in
thousand-franc notes. She goes to bed every night at one, and gets up in
the morning at five. And virtuous! Didn't Solomon say that a virtuous
woman was more precious than rubies? That's the kind of wife the wise
man chooses when he gives up the giddy ways of youth. Ah, my dear sir,
over and over again these last two or three days my dear old parents--I
have been on a visit to them in Aigues-Mortes--have commended my wisdom.
Amelie, who is devoted to me, left her cafe in Carcassonne to make their
acquaintance and receive their blessing before our marriage, also to
show them the lace on her _dessous_ and her new silk dress. They are too
old to take the long journey to Carcassonne. 'My son,' they said, 'you
are making a marriage after our own hearts. We are proud of you. Now we
can die perfectly content.' I was wrong, perhaps, in saying that Amelie
has no sentiment," he continued, after a short pause. "She adores me. It
is evident. She will not allow me out of her sight. Ah, my dear friend,
you don't know what a happy man I am."

For a brilliant young man of five-and-thirty, who was about to marry a
horrible Megaera ten or twelve years his senior, he looked unhealthily
happy. There was no doubt that his handsome roguery had caught the
woman's fancy. She was at the dangerous age, when even the most
ferro-concrete-natured of women are apt to run riot. She was
comprehensible, and pardonable. But the man baffled me. He was obviously
marrying her for her money; but how in the name of Diogenes and all the
cynics could he manage to look so co