a young man, the young man left college, and Mme. Mauperin's passion for him increased with all that satisfaction which a mother feels in a tall son when his looks begin to change and his beard makes its first appearance. Forgetting all about the tradespeople whose bills she had paid, she was amazed at the style in which her son dressed, at his boots, and the way in which he did his hair. There was a certain elegance of taste in everything that he liked, in his luxurious habits, in his ways, and in his whole life, to which she bowed down in astonishment and delight, as though she herself were not the mainspring of it all and his cashier. Her son's valet did not seem to her like an ordinary domestic; his horse was not merely a horse, it was her son's horse. When her son went out she gave orders that she should be told so that she might have the satisfaction of seeing him get into the carriage and drive away. Every day she was more and more taken up with this son. She had no diversions, nothing to occupy her imagination; she did not read, and had grown old living with a husband who had brought her no love and whom she had always felt to be quite apart from her, engrossed as he had ever been in his studies, politics, and business. She had no one left with her but a daughter to whom she had never given her whole heart, and so she had ended by devoting her life to Henri's interests and putting all her vanity into his future. And her one thought--the thought which occupied every hour of her days and nights, her fixed idea--was the marriage of this adored son. She wanted him to marry well, to make a match which should be rich enough and brilliant enough to make up to her and repay her for all the dulness and obscurity of her own existence, for her life of economy and solitude, for all her own privations as wife and mother. "Do you even know your son's age, M. Mauperin?" continued Mme. Mauperin. "Henri, why, my dear, Henri must be--He was born in 1826, wasn't he?" "Oh, that's just like a father to ask! Yes, 1826, the 12th of July, 1826." "Well, then, he is twenty-nine. Fancy that now, he is twenty-nine!"