"I come to the second point. We can no longer, I do not say live together, but see each other. We must part, and forever, while adhering faithfully to the programme I have outlined. The avowed reason must be one of those that our set will accept without looking beyond it. That reason is all ready--it is the mésalliance which you proposed to make and which you must make. A month ago the mere thought of it was intolerable to me. I showed you that plainly enough. To-day--" he shook his head with a bitter smile. "It is a horrible thing to me that the family you will found will bear the name of mine. But then I can do nothing. The Code would not allow me even to compel recognition of the circumstances. Besides, I have no right to demand that you should not make the most of your life. I cannot prevent that. I cannot prevent you from existing. No. You will marry therefore, ostensibly against my will. You will give me your word not to live in the same city with me, not to present your wife in our circle. I do not wish to meet you or to meet her.--Wait," he exclaimed imperiously, as Landri was about to reply. "If I were not certain, I say again, that people are talking, things would take care of themselves. You would leave this house this morning, never to return. But people are talking, and as neither you nor I have taken anybody into our confidence concerning our two discussions,--at Hez and at Saint-Mihiel,--the abrupt announcement of your marriage at this moment might be taken for a pretext. No matter how well everybody knows that I am not a man of these times, this theory of mésalliances is so weakened of late years, that people might say and would say: 'He has seized this opportunity; there's something else.'--Now, I propose that the reply shall be, as with one voice: 'No, there was nothing else.'--You have left the army under circumstances that have aroused the sympathy of everybody about you--about us, I should say, since no human power can prevent our interests being mutual. It is natural that I should take this time to receive, to bring people about you. I will receive--we will receive, together. I shall find the strength to maintain this attitude, and so will you. It will last as long as we make it, but we must arrange it so that, on the day when the news of your marriage and our rupture becomes known, everybody who is intimate with us shall say: 'Poor Claviers! he was so fond of his son!'--I doubt not that there will be those who will add: 'What a fool!'--One's vanity is not to be wounded when one thinks of honor, and the only way for me to defend Madame de Claviers' honor is to seem to believe in it. In that our interests are really mutual, with a mutuality which is not a falsehood. She was, she still is my wife, and she is your mother." "I repeat that I will obey you in everything," said the young man.