“Then you ought, in case you lose him,” said Thaddeus, in a voice which Clementine had never heard him use, “to grieve for him less than if you lost a man who was your pride, your love, and all your life,--as some men are to you women. Surely you can be frank at this moment with a friend like me. I shall grieve, too; long before your marriage I had made him my child, I had sacrificed my life to him. If he dies I shall be without an interest on earth; but life is still beautiful to a widow of twenty-four.” “Ah! but you know that I love no one,” she said, with the impatience of grief. “You don’t yet know what it is to love,” said Thaddeus. “Oh, as husbands are, I have sense enough to prefer a child like my poor Adam to a superior man. It is now over a month that we have been saying to each other, ‘Will he live?’ and these alternations have prepared me, as they have you, for this loss. I can be frank with you. Well, I would give my life to save Adam. What is a woman’s independence in Paris? the freedom to let herself be taken in by ruined or dissipated men who pretend to love her. I pray to God to leave me this husband who is so kind, so obliging, so little fault-finding, and who is beginning to stand in awe of me.” “You are honest, and I love you the better for it,” said Thaddeus, taking her hand which she yielded to him, and kissing it. “In solemn moments like these there is unspeakable satisfaction in finding a woman without hypocrisy. It is possible to converse with you. Let us look to the future. Suppose that God does not grant your prayer,--and no one cries to him more than I do, ‘Leave me my friend!’ Yes, these fifty nights have not weakened me; if thirty more days and nights are needed I can give them while you sleep,--yes, I will tear him from death if, as the doctors say, nursing can save him. But suppose that in spite of you and me, the count dies,--well, then, if you were loved, oh, adored, by a man of a heart and soul that are worthy of you--” “I may have wished for such love, foolishly, but I have never met with it.” “Perhaps you are mistaken--” Clementine looked fixedly at Thaddeus, imagining that there was less of love than of cupidity in his thoughts; her eyes measured him from head to foot and poured contempt upon him; then she crushed him with the words, “Poor Malaga!” uttered in tones which a great lady alone can find to give expression to her disdain. She rose, leaving Thaddeus half unconscious behind her, slowly re-entered her boudoir, and went back to Adam’s chamber.