Other men had made the same
decision; and when it was announced that between Claire and the widower
a marriage had been "arranged," the clerks in the foreign commission
houses and the agents of the steamship lines drowned their sorrow in rum
and ran the house flags to half-staff. Paillard himself took the
proposed alliance calmly. He was not an impetuous suitor. With Widow
Ducrot he agreed that Claire was still too young to marry, and to
himself kept the fact that to remarry he was in no haste. In his mind
doubts still lingered. With a wife, young enough to be one of his
children, disorganizing the routine of his villa, would it be any more
comfortable than he now found it? Would his eldest daughter and her
stepmother dwell together in harmony? The eldest daughter had assured
him that so far as she was concerned they would not; and, after all, in
marrying a girl, no matter how charming, without a dot, and the daughter
of a boarding-house keeper, no matter how respectable, was he not
disposing of himself too cheaply? These doubts assailed Papa Paillard;
these speculations were in his mind.
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