The conversation had deviated once more in the direction of Mme. Des Boys' administrative merits. "One meets so many different kinds of women," said M. Hervart. "The best of them is never equal to the dream one makes up about them." "Silly commonplace," he thought. "What answer will he make to that?" "I don't dream," said Lanfranc, "I search. But I scarcely ever find. Adventures have always disappointed me. That's why Paris is the only place for love affairs. One can find plenty of pleasant romances there with only one chapter--the last." "Your opinion of women ceases to astonish me then!" "His opinion is very reasonable," said M. Des Boys. "You talk as though you were still twenty-five, Hervart." He reddened a little. "Me! Oh no, thank God! I'm forty." And seeing the appropriateness of the occasion, he added: "You're jealous of my liberty, but I am becoming afraid that I may lose it." "Are you thinking of marriage?" asked Lanfranc. "Perhaps." "Mme. Suif would suit you very well. Leonor is being coy about her...." Irritated by so much vulgarity, M. Hervart got up and walked into the garden. Rose and Leonor were strolling there together. CHAPTER VIII Rose had laid her plans in such a fashion that the young man had found her in his path. Not to see her was too deliberately to avoid her. If he saw her, he had to take off his hat. And this was what had happened. Rose had answered his salutation by a word of welcome; conversation had then passed to the old house at Barnavast, finally to Mme. Suif. But Leonor was discreet and vague, so much so that at one of Rose's questions the conversation had switched off on to sentimental commonplaces. But, for Rose, nothing in the world was commonplace yet. "Isn't she rather old to marry again?" she asked. "Ah, but Mme. Suif is one of those whose hearts are always young." "Then there are some hearts that grow old more slowly than others?" "Some never grow old at all, just as some have never been young." "All the same, I see a great difference, when I look around me, between the feelings of young and old people." "Do you know many people?" "No, very few; but I have always seen a correspondence between people's hearts and faces." "Certainly; but a general truth, although it may represent the average of particular truths, is hardly ever the same as a single particular case selected by chance...." Rose looked at Leonor with a mixture of admiration and shame: she did not understand. Leonor perceived the fact and went on: "I mean that there are, in all things, exceptions. I also mean that there are rules which admit of a great number of exceptions. It even happens in life, just as in grammar, that the exceptional are more numerous than the regular cases. Do you follow?" "Oh, perfectly." "But that," he concluded, emphasising his words, "does not prevent the rule's being the rule, even though there were only two normal cases as against ten exceptions."