“I no longer wonder at my father-in-law’s follies,” said Steinbock to Lisbeth.

“If you say such things, Wenceslas, I shall to my dying day repent of having got you the loan of these ten thousand francs.  Are you, like all these men,” and she indicated the guests, “madly in love with that creature?  Remember, you would be your father-in-law’s rival.  And think of the misery you would bring on Hortense.”

“That is true,” said Wenceslas.  “Hortense is an angel; I should be a wretch.”

“And one is enough in the family!” said Lisbeth.

“Artists ought never to marry!” exclaimed Steinbock.

“Ah! that is what I always told you in the Rue du Doyenne.  Your groups, your statues, your great works, ought to be your children.”

“What are you talking about?” Valerie asked, joining Lisbeth.—­“Give us tea, Cousin.”

Steinbock, with Polish vainglory, wanted to appear familiar with this drawing-room fairy.  After defying Stidmann, Vignon, and Crevel with a look, he took Valerie’s hand and forced her to sit down by him on the settee.

“You are rather too lordly, Count Steinbock,” said she, resisting a little.  But she laughed as she dropped on to the seat, not without arranging the rosebud pinned into her bodice.

“Alas! if I were really lordly,” said he, “I should not be here to borrow money.”

“Poor boy!  I remember how you worked all night in the Rue du Doyenne.  You really were rather a spooney; you married as a starving man snatches a loaf.  You knew nothing of Paris, and you see where you are landed.  But you turned a deaf ear to Lisbeth’s devotion, as you did to the love of a woman who knows her Paris by heart.”

“Say no more!” cried Steinbock; “I am done for!”

“You shall have your ten thousand francs, my dear Wenceslas; but on one condition,” she went on, playing with his handsome curls.

“What is that?”

“I will take no interest——­”

“Madame!”

“Oh, you need not be indignant; you shall make it good by giving me a bronze group.  You began the story of Samson; finish it.—­Do a Delilah cutting off the Jewish Hercules’ hair.  And you, who, if you will listen to me, will be a great artist, must enter into the subject.  What you have to show is the power of woman.  Samson is a secondary consideration.  He is the corpse of dead strength.  It is Delilah —­passion—­that ruins everything.  How far more beautiful is that replica—­That is what you call it, I think—­” She skilfully interpolated, as Claude Vignon and Stidmann came up to them on hearing her talk of sculpture—­“how far more beautiful than the Greek myth is that replica of Hercules at Omphale’s feet.—­Did Greece copy Judaea, or did Judaea borrow the symbolism from Greece?”

“There, madame, you raise an important question—­that of the date of the various writings in the Bible.  The great and immortal Spinoza —­most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God—­asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence.  And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue.”