"Certainly not; I am perfectly well aware of the contrary."

"Well, then, where do you get the right of judging your neighbor so
severely?"

"I do not acknowledge Madame de Palme as my neighbor."

"That's convenient! Madame de Palme, sir, has been badly brought up, badly
married, and always spoilt; but, believe me, she is a genuine rough
diamond."

"I only see the roughness."

"And rest assured that it only requires a skillful workman--I mean a good
husband--to cut and polish it."

"Allow me to pity that future lapidary."

Madame de Malouet tapped the carpet with her foot, and manifested other
signs of impatience, which I knew not at first how to interpret, for she
is never out of humor; but suddenly a thought, which I took for a luminous
one, occurred in my mind; I had no doubt that I had at last discovered the
weak side and the only failing in that charming old woman. She was
possessed with the mania of match making, and, in her Christian anxiety to
snatch the Little Countess from the abyss of perdition, she was secretly
meditating to hurl me into it with her, unworthy though I be. Penetrated
with this modest conviction, I kept upon a defensive that seems to me, at
the present moment, perfectly ridiculous.

"Mon Dieu!" said Madame de Malouet, "because you doubt her learning!"