the present. He should feel himself unworthy of his
Louise's love (his proudest distinction) if he did not ask her to do for
David all that she had done for him. He would give up everything rather
than desert David Sechard; David must witness his success. It was one
of those wild letters in which a young man points a pistol at a refusal,
letters full of boyish casuistry and the incoherent reasoning of an
idealist; a delicious tissue of words embroidered here and there by the
naive utterances that women love so well--unconscious revelations of the
writer's heart.

Lucien left the letter with the housemaid, went to the office, and spent
the day in reading proofs, superintending the execution of orders, and
looking after the affairs of the printing-house. He said not a word
to David. While youth bears a child's heart, it is capable of sublime
reticence. Perhaps, too, Lucien began to dread the Phocion's axe which
David could wield when he chose, perhaps he was afraid to meet those
clear-sighted eyes that read the depths of his soul. But when he read
Chenier's poems with David, his secret rose from his heart to his lips
at the sting of a reproach that he felt as the patient feels the probing
of a wound.

And now try to understand the thoughts that troubled Lucien's mind as he
went down from Angouleme. Was the great lady angry with him? Would she
receive David? Had he, Lucien, in his ambition, flung himself headlong
back into the depths of L'Houmeau? Before he set that kiss on Louise's
forehead, he had had time to measure the distance between a queen and
her favorite, so far had he come in five months, and he did not tell
himself that David could cross over the same ground in a moment. Yet
he did not know how completely the lower orders were excluded from this
upper world; he did not so much as suspect that a second experiment
of this kind meant ruin for Mme. de Bargeton. Once accused and fairly
convicted of a liking for _canaille_, Louise would be driven from the
place, her caste would shun her as men shunned a leper in the Middle
Ages. Nais might have broken the moral law, and her whole circle,
the clergy and the flower of the aristocracy, would have defended her
against the world through thick and then; but a breach of another law,
the offence of admitting all sorts of people to her house--this was
sin without remission. The sins of those in power are always
overlooked--once let them abdicate, and they shall pay the p