risy is not virtue."

To a certain extent, the Manager of the Mutual Credit was right.

Already Mlle. de Thaller had had to decide upon several quite
suitable offers of marriage and she had squarely refused them all.

"A husband!" she had answered each time. "Thank you, none for me.
I have good enough teeth to eat up my dowry myself. Later, we'll
see,--when I've cut my wisdom teeth, and I am tired of my bachelor
life."

She did not seem near getting tired of it, though she pretended
that she had no more illusions, was thoroughly blasee, had
exhausted every sensation, and that life henceforth had no surprise
in reserve for her. Her reception of M. de Tregars was, therefore,
one of Mlle. Cesarine's least eccentricities, as was also that
sudden fancy; to apply to the situation one of the most idiotic
rondos of her repertoires:

"Cashier, you've got the bag;
Quick on your little nag"

Neither did she spare him a single verse: and, when she stopped,

"I see with pleasure," said M. de Tregars, "that the embezzlement
of which your father has just been the victim does not in any way
offend your good humor."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Would you have me cry," she said, "because the stockholders of the
Baron Three Francs Sixty-eight have been swindled? Console
yourself: they are accustomed to it."

And, as M. de Tregars made no answer,

"And in all that," she went on, "I see no one to pity except the
wife and daughter of that old stick Favoral."

"They are, indeed, much to be pitied."

"They say that the mother is a good old thing."

"She is an excellent person."

"And the daughter? Costeclar was crazy about her once. He made
eyes like a carp in love, as he told us, to mamma and myself,
'She is an angel, mesdames, an angel! And when I have given her a
little chic!' Now tell me, is she really as good looking as all
that?"

"She is quite good looking."

"Better looking than me?"

"It is not the same style, mademoiselle."

Mlle. de Thaller had stopped singing; but she had not left the
piano. Half turned towards M. de Tregars, she ran her fingers
listlessly over the keys, striking a note here and there, as if to
punctuate her sentences.

"Ah, how nice!" she exclaimed, "and, above all, how gallant!
Really, if you venture often on such declarations, mothers would be
very wrong to trust you alone with their daughters."

"You did not understand me right, mademoiselle."

"Pe