"To be your wife. Yes," she said; and this time her blue eyes beneath their half-closed lids gazed steadfastly at Landri. Her delicate mouth closed in a fold of decision. Her whole fragile person was as if stiffened in a tension which proved to the lover the force of the emotion that she held in check. She repeated: "Yes, I refuse. I could find many pretexts to give you which, to others, would be good reasons, and which should be so to me. I have a child. I might say to you: 'I do not want him to have a stepfather.' That would not be true. You would be to him, I am sure, as you said, a second father. I might dwell upon my loss, which is so recent, in order to postpone my reply until later. Later, the reason which makes me decline the offer of your name would be the same, for it is just that name, it is what it represents, which forbids me to abandon myself to a liking of which you have had too many proofs. I shall soon be twenty-eight, my friend. I am no longer exactly a young woman. I have reflected much on marriage. I know that if people marry to love each other, they marry also to live and remain together, to have a home, to be a family. For that it is essential that there should not be, between the husband and wife, one of those unalterable differences of birth and environment, which make it impossible that her people should ever be really related to his.--Your name? It is not only very old, it is illustrious. It is blended with the whole history of France. There was a Maréchal de Claviers-Grandchamp who was a comrade of Bayard, a Cardinal de Claviers-Grandchamp who was a friend of Bossuet. Claviers-Grandchamps have been ambassadors, governors of provinces, commanders of the Saint-Esprit, peers of France. Your house has contracted alliances with ten other houses of the French or European aristocracy. You are cousins of English dukes, of German and Italian princes. You are a _grand seigneur_, and I a bourgeoise, a very petty bourgeoise.--Do not you interrupt me, either," she said, placing her slender hand on the young man's arm and arresting thus his protest; "it is better that I should say it all at once. In all this I am moved neither by humility nor by pride. I have never understood either of those sentiments, when there is question of facts so impossible to deny or to modify as our situation. I am a bourgeoise, I say again. That means that my people lived in straitened circumstances at first, then modestly. I consider myself rich with the thirty thousand francs a year that they saved for me, in how many years! It is a fortune in our world, in yours it would be ruin. When I walk in that quarter, before those ancient hôtels which are still to be found there, on the afternoon of a grand reception, I see their courtyards, the coupés and automobiles waiting, the footmen in livery, all that luxury of existence which you no longer notice, it is so natural to you,--and do you know what my