woman,--the superior and sincere type, which he does
not happen often to encounter.]

_Madame Leverdet_--Let us come to serious topics while we are alone,
my friend.

_De Ryons_--And apropos of them?

_Madame Leverdet_--Are you willing to be married off yet?

_De Ryons_ [_with a start of terror_]--Pardon me, my dear lady! At
what hour can I take the first train for Paris?

_Madame Leverdet_--Now listen to me, at least.

_De Ryons_--What! Here it is two years since I have called on you; I
come to make you a little visit of a morning, in all good friendship,
with the thermometer forty, centigrade; I am totally unsuspecting; all
I ask is to have a little lively chat with a clever woman--and see how
you receive me.

_Madame Leverdet_ [_continuing_]--A simple, charming young girl--

_De Ryons_ [_interrupting her, and in the same tone_]-- --musical,
speaks English, draws nicely, sings agreeably, a society woman, a
domestic woman,--all at the choice of the applicant.

_Madame Leverdet_ [_laughing_]--Yes, and pretty and graceful and rich;
and, by-the-by, one who finds you a charming fellow.

_De Ryons_--She is quite right there. I shall make a charming
husband--I shall; I know it. Only thirty-two years old; all my teeth,
all my hair (no such very common detail, the way young men are
nowadays); lively, sixty thousand livres income as a landed
proprietor--oh, I am an excellent match: only unfortunately I am not a
marrying man.

_Madame Leverdet_--And why not, if you please?

_De Ryons_ [_smiling_]--It would interfere severely with my studies.

_Madame Leverdet_--What sort of studies?

_De Ryons_--My studies of--woman.

_Madame Leverdet_--Really! I don't understand you.

_De Ryons_--What! Do you not know that I am making women my
particular, my incessant study, and that I am reckoning on leaving
some new and very interesting documents dealing with that branch of
natural history?--a branch very little understood just at present, in
spite of all that has been written on the topic. My friend, I cannot
sacrifice the species to the individual; I belong to science. It is
quite impossible for me to give myself wholly and completely--as one
certainly should do when he marries--to one of those charming and
terrible little carnivora for whose sake men dishonor themselves, ruin
themselves, kill themselves; whose sole preoccupation, in the midst of
the universal carnage that they make, is to dress themselves now like