r keep
for de rest of your days."

Esther took the paper without the slightest excitement, folded it up,
and put it in her dressing-table drawer.

"So now you are quite happy, you monster of iniquity!" said she, giving
Nucingen a little slap on the cheek, "now that I have at last accepted a
present from you. I can no longer tell you home-truths, for I share the
fruit of what you call your labors. This is not a gift, my poor old boy,
it is restitution.--Come, do not put on your Bourse face. You know that
I love you."

"My lofely Esther, mein anchel of lofe," said the banker, "do not speak
to me like dat. I tell you, I should not care ven all de vorld took me
for a tief, if you should tink me ein honest man.--I lofe you every day
more and more."

"That is my intention," said Esther. "And I will never again say
anything to distress you, my pet elephant, for you are grown as artless
as a baby. Bless me, you old rascal, you have never known any innocence;
the allowance bestowed on you when you came into the world was bound to
come to the top some day; but it was buried so deep that it is only
now reappearing at the age of sixty-six. Fished up by love's barbed
hook.--This phenomenon is seen in old men.

"And this is why I have learned to love you, you are young--so young! No
one but I would ever have known this, Frederic--I alone. For you were
a banker at fifteen; even at college you must have lent your
school-fellows one marble on condition of their returning two."

Seeing him laugh, she sprang on to his knee.

"Well, you must do as you please! Bless me! plunder the men--go ahead,
and I will help. Men are not worth loving; Napoleon killed them off
like flies. Whether they pay taxes to you or to the Government, what
difference does it make to them? You don't make love over the budget,
and on my honor!--go ahead, I have thought it over, and you are right.
Shear the sheep! you will find it in the gospel according to Beranger.

"Now, kiss your Esther.--I say, you will give that poor Val-Noble all
the furniture in the Rue Taitbout? And to-morrow I wish you would give
her fifty thousand francs--it would look handsome, my duck. You see,
you killed Falleix; people are beginning to cry out upon you, and this
liberality will look Babylonian--all the women will talk about it! Oh!
there will be no one in Paris so grand, so noble as you; and as the
world is constituted, Falleix will be forgotten. So, after all, it will
be money