Bressant

"But what am I to do?" resumed the professor, sitting up in his chair, and shaking out his shirt-sleeves--for the heat of his meditations had brought on a perspiration; "what can I do--eh? Sophie not in condition to travel--can't leave her to take Cornelia--no one else to take her--and she can't go alone, that's certain! Humph!"

Professor Valeyon paused in his soliloquy, like a man who has turned into a closed court under the impression that it is a thoroughfare, and stared down with upwrinkled forehead at the sole of the kicked-off slipper, indulging the while in a mental calculation of how many days it would take for the hole near the toe to work down to the hole under the instep, and thus render problematical the possibility of keeping the shoe on at all. It might take three weeks, or