This tickled Professor Valeyon so much, that he burst out in a most
genuine laugh. The intellectual animal of two or three months before
seemed to have laid aside all claims to what his brain had won for him,
and to be beginning existence over again with a new object and new
materials. And had Bressant indeed been a child, the succession of his
ideas and impulses could hardly have been more primitive and natural.
"What's to become of our Hebrew and history, if you turn poet?" inquired
the old gentleman, still chuckling.
Bressant turned his head away and closed his eyes wearily. "I don't want
any thing more to do with that," said he. "Love is study enough, and
work enough, for a lifetime. Mathematics, and logic, and philosophy--all
those things have nothing to do with love, and couldn't help me in it.
It's outside of every thing else: it has laws of its own: I'm just
beginning to learn them."
"A professional lover! well, as long as you recognize the sufficiency of
one object in your studies, you might do worse, that's certain. But you
can't make a living out of it, my boy."
"I don't need money, I have enough; if I hadn't, money-making is for
men without hearts; but mine is bigger than my head; I must give myself
up to it."
"That won't do," returned the professor, shaking his head. "Lovers must
earn their bread-and-butter as well as people with brains. Besides,"
here his face and tone became serious, "there's one thing we've both
forgotten. This matter of your false name--you can't be married as
Bressant, you know: and if the tenure of your property depends, as you
said, on preserving the incognito, I have reason to believe that you
stand an excellent chance of losing every cent of it, the moment the
minister has pronounced your real name."
"No matter!" said the young man, with an impatient movement, as if to
dismiss an unprofitable subject. "I shall have Sophie; my father's will
can't deprive me of her. I don't want to be famous, nor to have a great
reputation--except with her."
The old man was touched at this devotion, unreasonable and impracticable
though it was. He laid his hand kindly on the invalid's big shoulder.
"I don't say but that a wife's a good exchange for the world, my boy;
I'm glad you should feel it, too. But when you marry her, you promise to
support her, as long as you have strength and health to do it. It's a
natural and necessary consequence of your love for her"--and here the
professor paused a moment to marvel at the position in which he found
himself--stating the first axioms of life to such a man as this pupil of
his; "and you should be unwilling to take her, as I certainly should be
to give her, on any other terms. If your hands are empty, you must at
any rate be able to show that they won't always continue so."