du Tillet knocked at the door, the live red that colored Malvina's
face said 'Ferdinand!' When the poor girl's eyes fell on that
two-footed tiger, they lighted up like a brazier fanned by a current
of air. When Ferdinand drew her away to the window or a side table,
she betrayed her secret infinite joy. It is a rare and wonderful thing
to see a woman so much in love that she loses her cunning to be strange,
and you can read her heart; as rare (dear me!) in Paris as the Singing
Flower in the Indies. But in spite of a friendship dating from the
d'Aldriggers' first appearance at the Nucingens', Ferdinand did not
marry Malvina. Our ferocious friend was not apparently jealous of
Desroches, who paid assiduous court to the young lady; Desroches
wanted to pay off the rest of the purchase-money due for his
connection; Malvina could not well have less than fifty thousand
crowns, he thought, and so the lawyer was fain to play the lover.
Malvina, deeply humiliated as she was by du Tillet's carelessness,
loved him too well to shut the door upon him. With her, an
enthusiastic, highly-wrought, sensitive girl, love sometimes got the
better of pride, and pride again overcame wounded love. Our friend
Ferdinand, cool and self-possessed, accepted her tenderness, and
breathed the atmosphere with the quiet enjoyment of a tiger licking
the blood that dyes his throat. He would come to make sure of it with
new proofs; he never allowed two days to pass without a visit to the
Rue Joubert.

"At that time the rascal possessed something like eighteen hundred
thousand francs; money must have weighted very little with him in the
question of marriage; and he had not merely been proof against
Malvina, he had resisted the Barons de Nucingen and de Rastignac;
though both of them had set him galloping at the rate of seventy-five
leagues a day, with outriders, regardless of expense, through mazes of