“Good heavens!” she cried; “you have neither heart nor soul! Here’s sixteen years that I have spent my youth in this house, and I have only just found out that you have got a stone there (striking her breast). For two months you have seen before your eyes that brave captain, a victim of the Bourbons, who was cut out for a general, and is down in the depths of poverty, hunted into a hole of a place where there’s no way to make a penny of money! He’s forced to sit on a stool all day in the mayor’s office to earn--what? Six hundred miserable francs,--a fine thing, indeed! And here are you, with six hundred and fifty-nine thousand well invested, and sixty thousand francs’ income,--thanks to me, who never spend more than three thousand a year, everything included, even my own clothes, yes, everything!--and you never think of offering him a home here, though there’s the second floor empty! You’d rather the rats and mice ran riot in it than put a human being there,--and he a lad your father always allowed to be his own son! Do you want to know what you are? I’ll tell you,--a fratricide! And I know why, too. You see I take an interest in him, and that provokes you. Stupid as you seem, you have got more spite in you than the spitefullest of men. Well, yes! I do take an interest in him, and a keen one--” “But, Flore--” “‘_But, Flore_’, indeed! What’s that got to do with it? You may go and find another Flore (if you can!), for I hope this glass of wine may poison me if I don’t get away from your dungeon of a house. I haven’t, God be thanked! cost you one penny during the twelve years I’ve been with you, and you have had the pleasure of my company into the bargain. I could have earned my own living anywhere with the work that I’ve done here,--washing, ironing, looking after the linen, going to market, cooking, taking care of your interests before everything, slaving myself to death from morning till night,--and this is my reward!” “But, Flore--” “Oh, yes, ‘_Flore_’! find another Flore, if you can, at your time of life, fifty-one years old, and getting feeble,--for the way your health is failing is frightful, I know that! and besides, you are none too amusing--” “But, Flore--” “Let me alone!” She went out, slamming the door with a violence that echoed through the house, and seemed to shake it to its foundations. Jean-Jacques softly opened the door and went, still more softly, into the kitchen where she was muttering to herself. “But, Flore,” said the poor sheep, “this is the first time I have heard of this wish of yours; how do you know whether I will agree to it or not?”