“At any rate, my good friend, you don’t mince your words; an infamous thought comes into your head and you state it with charming frankness. Luckily you shall presently hear me make the proposal to Theodose, and you are clever enough to know by his manner if there has been any connivance between us.” “So be it!” said Dutocq. “I withdraw the insinuation; but I must say your employers are pirates; I call their proposal throttling people. I have not, like you, something to fall back upon.” “Well, you poor fellow, this is how I reasoned: I said to myself, That good Dutocq is terribly pressed for the last payment on his practice; this will give him enough to pay it off at one stroke; events have proved that there are great uncertainties about our Theodose-and-Thuillier scheme; here’s money down, live money, and therefore it won’t be so bad a bargain after all.” “It is a loss of two-fifths!” “Come,” said Cerizet, “you were talking just now of commissions. I see a means of getting one for you if you’ll engage to batter down this Colleville marriage. If you will cry it down as you have lately cried it up I shouldn’t despair of getting you a round twenty thousand out of the affair.” “Then you think that this new proposal will not be agreeable to la Peyrade,--that he’ll reject it? Is it some heiress on whom he has already taken a mortgage?” “All that I can tell you is that these people expect some difficulty in bringing the matter to a conclusion.” “Well, I don’t desire better than to follow your lead and do what is disagreeable to la Peyrade; but five thousand francs--think of it!--it is too much to lose.” At this moment the door opened, and a waiter ushered in the expected guest. “You can serve dinner,” said Cerizet to the waiter; “we are all here.” It was plain that Theodose was beginning to take wing toward higher social spheres; elegance was becoming a constant thought in his mind. He appeared in a dress suit and varnished shoes, whereas his two associates received him in frock-coats and muddy boots. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I think I am a little late, but that devil of a Thuillier is the most intolerable of human beings about a pamphlet I am concocting for him. I was unlucky enough to agree to correct the proofs with him, and over every paragraph there’s a fight. ‘What I can’t understand,’ he says, ‘the public can’t, either. I’m not a man of letters, but I’m a practical man’; and that’s the way we battle it, page after page. I thought the sitting this afternoon would never end.” “How unreasonable you are, my dear fellow,” said Dutocq; “when a man wants to succeed he must have the courage to make sacrifices. Once married, you can lift your head.” “Ah, yes!” said la Peyrade with a sigh, “I’ll lift it; for since the day you made me eat this bread of anguish I’ve become terribly sick of it.” “Cerizet,” said Dutocq, “has a plan that will feed you more succulently.”