a proportion of his money to his expenses? Until the first year was
nearly at an end, Goriot had dined out once or twice every week, but
these occasions came less frequently, and at last he was scarcely
absent from the dinner-table twice a month. It was hardly expected
that Mme. Vauquer should regard the increased regularity of her
boarder's habits with complacency, when those little excursions of his
had been so much to her interest. She attributed the change not so
much to a gradual diminution of fortune as to a spiteful wish to annoy
his hostess. It is one of the most detestable habits of a Liliputian
mind to credit other people with its own malignant pettiness.

Unluckily, towards the end of the second year, M. Goriot's conduct
gave some color to the idle talk about him. He asked Mme. Vauquer to
give him a room on the second floor, and to make a corresponding
reduction in her charges. Apparently, such strict economy was called
for, that he did without a fire all through the winter. Mme. Vauquer
asked to be paid in advance, an arrangement to which M. Goriot
consented, and thenceforward she spoke of him as "Father Goriot."

What had brought about this decline and fall? Conjecture was keen, but
investigation was difficult. Father Goriot was not communicative; in
the sham countess' phrase he was "a curmudgeon." Empty-headed people
who babble about their own affairs because they have nothing else to
occupy them, naturally conclude that if people say nothing of their
doings it is because their doings will not bear being talked about; so
the highly respectable merchant became a scoundrel, and the late beau
was an old rogue. Opinion fluctuated. Sometimes, according to Vautrin,
who came about this time to live in the Maison Vauquer, Father Goriot
was a man who went on 'Change and _dabbled_ (to use the sufficiently
expressive language of the Stock Exchange) in stocks and shares after