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Updated: June 16, 2025
The portress replied, as the portress invariably replies, that her lodger had gone out barely three minutes before; but then, through the little square hole of her lodge-window taking the measure of Newman's fortunes, and seeing them, by an unspecified process, refresh the dry places of servitude to occupants of fifth floors on courts, she added that M. Nioche would have had just time to reach the Cafe de la Patrie, round the second corner to the left, at which establishment he regularly spent his afternoons.
M. Nioche continued to stare; he appeared afraid to move, even to the extent of evading Newman's glance. "Dear me," said Newman; "are you here, too?" And he looked at his neighbor's helplessness more grimly than he knew. M. Nioche had a new hat and a pair of kid gloves; his clothes, too, seemed to belong to a more recent antiquity than of yore.
He won't ask till the end of the lessons, and then I will make out the bill." M. Nioche turned to the confiding foreigner again, and stood rubbing his hands, with an air of seeming to plead guilty which was not intenser only because it was habitually so striking.
He is very much interested in me; he can be left to his own devices. He is a contrast to you." "Oh, he is a great contrast to me, I have no doubt" said Newman. "But I don't exactly know how you mean it." "I mean it in this way. First of all, he never offered to help me to a dot and a husband." And Mademoiselle Nioche paused, smiling. "I won't say that is in his favor, for I do you justice.
"No," said Newman, gravely, still in his bad French, "you must not talk to Mademoiselle Nioche, because you say discouraging things. You ought to tell her to work, to persevere." "And we French, mademoiselle," said Valentin, "are accused of being false flatterers!" "I don't want any flattery, I want only the truth. But I know the truth."
But it was not to her that Newman applied; he simply asked of the portress if M. Nioche were at home.
Oh, I was wide awake, then. My father was a great commercant; he placed me for a year in a counting-house in England. Some of it stuck to me; but I have forgotten!" "How much French can I learn in a month?" "What does he say?" asked Mademoiselle Noemie. M. Nioche explained. "He will speak like an angel!" said his daughter.
Was that miserable old man still treading the path of vice in her train? Was he still giving her the benefit of his experience of affairs, and had he crossed the sea to serve as her interpreter? Newman walked some distance farther, and then began to retrace his steps taking care not to traverse again the orbit of Mademoiselle Nioche.
"He remarked, indeed," said Newman, "that he has not forgiven her. But she'll never find it out." "We must do him the justice to suppose he doesn't like the thing," Valentin rejoined. "Mademoiselle Nioche is like the great artists whose biographies we read, who at the beginning of their career have suffered opposition in the domestic circle.
"Ten thousand francs," said the young girl, without a smile. "Everything that Mademoiselle Nioche may do at present is mine in advance," said Newman. "It makes part of an order I gave her some months ago. So you can't have this." "Monsieur will lose nothing by it," said the young girl, looking at Valentin. And she began to put up her utensils.
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