“You can hardly expect to dazzle T——­ with the munificence and tastefulness of your presents.  Your father gives you a hundred sous a week to spend; a great deal for a bookbinder, but very little for a woman whose gowns cost from five hundred to three thousand francs apiece.  And, as you are neither a Manager to sign agreements, nor a Dramatic Author to apportion roles, nor a Journalist to write notices, nor a young man from the draper’s to take advantage of a moment’s caprice as opportunity offers when delivering a new frock, I don’t see in the least how you are to make her favour you, and I think your tragedy queen did quite right to slam her gate in your face.”

“Ah, well!” sighed Jean Servien, “I told you just now I loved her.  It is not true.  I hate her!  I hate her for all the torments she has made me suffer, I hate her because she is adorable and men love her.  And I hate all women, because they all love someone, and that someone is not I!”

Garneret burst out laughing.

“Candidly,” he grinned, “they are not so far wrong.  Your love has no spark of anything affectionate, kindly, useful in it.  Since the day you fell in love with Mademoiselle T——­, have you once thought of sparing her pain?  Have you once dreamed of making a sacrifice for her sake?  Has any touch of human kindness ever entered into your passion?  Can it show one mark of manliness or goodness?  Not it.  Well, being the poor devils we are, with our own way to push in life and nothing to help us on, we must be brave and good.  It is half-past one, and I have to get up at five.  Good night.  Cultivate a quiet mind, and come and see me.”

XVII

Jean had only three days left to prepare for his examination for admission to the Ministry of Finance.  These he spent at home, where the faces of father, aunt, and apprentice seemed strange and unfamiliar, so completely had they disappeared from his thoughts.  Monsieur Servien was displeased with his son, but was too timid as well as too tactful to make any overt reproaches.  His aunt overwhelmed him with garrulous expressions of doting affection; at night she would creep into his room to see if he was sound asleep, while all day long she wearied him with the tale of her petty grievances and dislikes.

Once she had caught the apprentice with her spectacles, her sacred spectacles, perched on his nose, and the profanation had left a kind of religious horror in her mind.

“That boy is capable of anything,” she used to say.  One of the boy’s pet diversions was to execute behind the old lady’s back a war-dance of the Cannibal Islanders he had seen once at a theatre.  Sticking feathers he had plucked from a feather-broom in his hair, and holding a big knife without a handle between his teeth, he would creep nearer and nearer, crouching low and advancing by little leaps and bounds, with ferocious grimaces which gradually gave place to a look of disappointed