"Oh," she whimpered, "rather than break your heart I--I might break the
engagement! I might consider again, Gustave."

"No, no," returned Tricotrin, "I will not reproach myself with the
thought that I have marred your life; I will leave you free. Besides,
as I say, I am not certain that I should want you so much but for the
fact that I have lost you. After all, you will not appreciate the poem
that immortalises you, and if I lived, many of your remarks about it
would doubtless infuriate me."

"Why shall I not appreciate it? Am I so stupid?"

"It is not that you are stupid, my Soul," he explained; "it is that I
am transcendentally clever. To understand the virtues of my work one
must have sipped from all the flowers of Literature. 'There is to be
found in it Racine, Voltaire, Flaubert, Renan--and always Gustave
Tricotrin,' as Lemaitre has written. He wrote, '--and always Anatole
France,' but I paraphrase him slightly. So you are going to marry
Pomponnet? Mon Dieu, when I have any sous in my pocket, I will ruin
myself, for the rapture of regretting you among the pastry!"

"I thought," she said, a little mortified, "that you were going to
drown yourself?"

"Am I not to write my Lament to you? I must eat while I write it--why
not pastry? Also, when I am penniless and starving, you may sometimes,
in your prosperity--And yet, perhaps, it is too much to ask?"

"Give you tick, do you mean, dear? But yes, Gustave; how can you doubt