"The Baron ought to see that," said Monsieur. He was a man of quiet
manners, not over-social, who had once enjoyed a handsome business income,
but had early--about the time of his marriage--been made poor through the
partial collapse of the house in Havre whose cotton-buyer he had been,
and, in a scant way, still was. "When a cotton-buyer geds down, he stays,"
was all the explanation he ever gave us. He had unfretfully let adversity
cage him for life in the only occupation he knew, while the wife he adored
kept him pecuniarily bled to death, without sharing his silent resigna--
There I go again! Somehow I can't talk about her without seeming unjust
and rude. I felt it just now, even, when I quoted her husband's fond word,
that she always chose to be the rose herself. Well, she nearly always
succeeded; she was a rose--with some of the rose's drawbacks.

When we asked who the Baron might be it was she who told us, but in a
certain disappointed way, as if she would rather have kept him unknown a
while longer. He was, she said, a profoundly learned man, graduate of one
of those great universities over in his native Germany, and a naturalist.
Young? Well, eh--comparatively--yes. At which the silent husband smiled
his dissent.

The Baron was an entomologist. Both the Fontenettes thought we should be
fascinated with the beauty of some of his cases of moths and butterflies.

"And coleoptera," said the soft rose-wife. She could ask him to bring them
to us. Take us to him?--Oh!--eh--her embarrassment made her prettier, as
she broke it to us gently that the Baroness was a seamstress. She hushed
at her husband's mention of shirts; but recovered when he harked back to
the Baron, and beamed her unspoken apologies for the great, brave scholar
who daily, silently bore up under this awful humiliation.