“Safety. Yes,” said madame Vervier. “The deep, quiet stream.” “She’s that already,” said Giles. “Alix isn’t the mountain-torrent.” “Ah, we none of us know what we are till we come to the precipice,” said madame Vervier. “But I am glad you feel that of my Alix. I trust your reading. I could almost believe, at moments, watching you with her, that you understand her better than I do. There is in Alix an austerity that sometimes disconcerts me. Yours is a nature nearer hers than mine. I have thought of it deeply in these last days, monsieur Giles, and I have made up my mind. Will you marry her?” said madame Vervier, laying down the stone. CHAPTER XI “There are many things to consider,” madame Vervier pursued, simply and tranquilly, while Giles sat transfixed. “I should have to think of many things.—Your position; your prospects; they are not, I gather, brilliant. But one of the gravest disadvantages of a position like mine is that it narrows my field of choice; terribly narrows it. Family and position count for everything here in France. It is not one little individual choosing another little individual; we are more serious than you in that. It is one family choosing another. It is two _foyers_ coming together to found a third. I have spoiled all this for Alix.” Madame Vervier took up her stone again, again weighing it in her hand, and now it was as if she weighed the sense of her culpability towards her child. “I have spoiled it. Money would have helped me to atone; but not only was I not _philosophe_ at twenty-three; I was also credulous; ignorant; reckless. The man for whom I left my husband was poor and had great schemes. I gave him all I had. He sucked me dry. _C’était un bien méchant homme_,” madame Vervier remarked in a tone of surpassing detachment, “and what would have been my fate I cannot tell had not the admirable friend who rescued me from his clutches left me, on dying, a small annuity. That is all I dispose of. And with what I have been able to set aside for Alix year by year, I have amassed only the tiniest _dot_; hardly enough to clothe her.—I go into all this very summarily for the moment, though I owe you every detail. You shall have them later on. You shall hear of the old aunts who brought me up and who were, also, inveigled by monsieur Vervier. Even my family did not save me since I was so unfortunate as to marry him after the divorce. It is a long story. But for the present it is enough that you should see why, aside from my own position, there is for Alix no possibility of a suitable marriage in France. Whereas in England all is different.”