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Stella complied instantly, thinking, "Graydon may return now at any moment, and if he sees that I am not with Arnault will come to me, as usual." Arnault bowed politely, looked at his watch, and invited another lady to dance. Stella had been on the floor but a few moments when not Graydon, but her father came and said to her partner, "Excuse me, sir. I wish to speak to my daughter."
Not long afterward, at the reception given by the minister of foreign affairs to the conqueror of Italy, the indefatigable seeker for notoriety addressed the latter once again. The scene is given in the memoirs of Arnault. At first she plied her suit with fulsome compliment. Bonaparte listened coldly, and the conversation flagged.
She saw that her relations with Arnault gave him an advantage and a freedom which he proposed to use that she had no ground on which to find fault and that he was too proud to permit censure for a course less open to criticism than her own. Before she slept she thought long and deeply, at last concluding that perhaps affairs were taking the right turn for her purpose.
His strong assurance that he was abundantly able to take care of her, that Mr. Muir was wealthy and free from financial embarrassment, almost turned the scale. She felt that both Arnault and her father were deceiving her for their own purposes, and she had little hesitation in acting for herself without regard to them.
I still believe that Graydon can give me all I want at present, and at the same time a position in society which Arnault could never attain, though worth millions. Arnault is on top of the wave now, but he is a speculator, like papa, and I'm sick of these Wall Street ups and downs. I believe in Henry Muir's conservatism. Because he is keeping quiet now they think he is going to fail.
He was always especially grateful for it to Lucien, and somewhat to the Bonapartes in general. Receiving a small appointment in the bureau of the University through the intervention of the Academician Arnault, a friend of Lucien Bonaparte, Béranger lived gayly during the last six years of the Empire. He managed to escape the conscription, and never shouldered a musket.
He had been taught in the best school in the world how to say and look one thing and mean another. At last an acquaintance approached, and said, "Pardon me, Mr. Arnault, but I don't propose to permit you to monopolize Miss Wildmere all the evening;" and then asked for the next dance.
"Arnault has a clear field now," Graydon had thought, cynically, while at breakfast. "I can scarcely wish him anything worse than success;" and then he looked complacently around the family group to which he belonged, and felicitated himself that Wildmere traits were conspicuously absent. His eyes dwelt oftenest on Madge.
"Are you going to accept Muir?" "I'm not going to accept any one at present certainly not Mr. Muir before he asks me." "He will ask you." "Has he taken you into his confidence?" "Oh, he's as patent as a country borrower." "Mr. Arnault, we must change the subject; such questions and remarks are not in good taste, to say the least.
Arnault, permitting the other to see through a veiled distinctness of language that he was prospering, remarked, "By the way, I have a little transaction which I wish you would carry out for us," and mentioned an affair of ordinary brokerage, concluding, in off-hand tones, "from what you said some days since I infer that you may find a little money handy at present.
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