a, "that, after
remaining a widow for the seven best years of my life, and refusing the
most brilliant offers for my daughter's sake, I should be suspected of
such a piece of folly as marrying again at thirty-nine years of age.
If we were not talking business I should regard your suggestion as an
impertinence."

"Would it not be more impertinent if I suggested that you could not
marry again?"

"Can and will are separate terms," remarked Solonet, gallantly.

"Well," resumed Maitre Mathias, "we will say nothing of your marriage.
You may, and we all desire it, live for forty-five years to come. Now,
if you keep for yourself the life-interest in your daughter's patrimony,
your children are laid on the shelf for the best years of their lives."

"What does that mean?" said the widow. "I don't understand being laid on
a shelf."

Solonet, the man of elegance and good taste, began to laugh.

"I'll translate it for you," said Mathias. "If your children are wise
they will think of the future. To think of the future means laying by
half our income, provided we have only two children, to whom we are
bound to give a fine education and a handsome dowry. Your daughter and
son-in-law will, therefore, be reduced to live on twenty thousand francs
a year, though each has spent fifty thousand while still unmarried. But
that is nothing. The law obliges my client to account, hereafter, to his
children for the eleven hundred and fifty-six thousand francs of their
mother's patrimony; yet he may not have received them if his wife should
die and madame should survive her, which may very well happen. To sign
such a contract is to fling one's self into the river, bound hand and
foot. You wish to make your daughter happy, do you not? If she loves her
husband, a fact which notaries never doubt, she will share his troubles.
Madame, I see enough in this scheme to make her die of grief and
anxiety; you are consigning her to poverty. Yes, madame, poverty; to
persons accustomed to the use of one hundred thousand francs a year,
twenty thousand is poverty. Moreover, if Monsieur le comte, out of
love for his wife, were guilty of extravagance, she could ruin him by
exercising her rights when misfortunes overtook him. I plead now for
you, for them, for their children, for every one."

"The old fellow makes a lot of smoke with his cannon," thought Maitre
Solonet, giving his client a look, which meant, "Keep on!"

"There is one way of combining all inte