he cries, ’you can’t imagine what a satisfaction it is to feel all that penniless, beggarly lot of the dear, honest, meritorious poor wriggling and slobbering under one’s boots.’  You may tell me that he is a contemptible animal anyhow, but you should have heard the tone!  I felt my bare arms go cold like ice.  A moment before I had been hot and faint with sheer boredom.  I jumped up from the table, rang for Rose, and told her to bring me my fur cloak.  He remained in his chair leering at me curiously.  When I had the fur on my shoulders and the girl had gone out of the room I gave him the surprise of his life.  ’Take yourself off instantly,’ I said.  ’Go trample on the poor if you like but never dare speak to me again.’  At this he leaned his head on his arm and sat so long at the table shading his eyes with his hand that I had to ask, calmly—­you know—­whether he wanted me to have him turned out into the corridor.  He fetched an enormous sigh.  ‘I have only tried to be honest with you, Rita.’  But by the time he got to the door he had regained some of his impudence.  ‘You know how to trample on a poor fellows too,’ he said.  ’But I don’t mind being made to wriggle under your pretty shoes, Rita.  I forgive you.  I thought you were free from all vulgar sentimentalism and that you had a more independent mind.  I was mistaken in you, that’s all.’  With that he pretends to dash a tear from his eye-crocodile!—­and goes out, leaving me in my fur by the blazing fire, my teeth going like castanets. . .  Did you ever hear of anything so stupid as this affair?” she concluded in a tone of extreme candour and a profound unreadable stare that went far beyond us both.  And the stillness of her lips was so perfect directly she ceased speaking that I wondered whether all this had come through them or only had formed itself in my mind.

Presently she continued as if speaking for herself only.

“It’s like taking the lids off boxes and seeing ugly toads staring at you.  In every one.  Every one.  That’s what it is having to do with men more than mere—­Good-morning—­Good evening.  And if you try to avoid meddling with their lids, some of them will take them off themselves.  And they don’t even know, they don’t even suspect what they are showing you.  Certain confidences—­they don’t see it--are the bitterest kind of insult.  I suppose Azzolati imagines himself a noble beast of prey.  Just as some others imagine themselves to be most delicate, noble, and refined gentlemen.  And as likely as not they would trade on a woman’s troubles—­and in the end make nothing of that either.  Idiots!”

The utter absence of all anger in this spoken meditation gave it a character of touching simplicity.  And as if it had been truly only a meditation we conducted ourselves as though we had not heard it.  Mills began to speak of his experiences during his visit to the army of the Legitimist King.  And I discovered in his speeches that this man of books could be graphic and picturesque.  His admiration for the devotion and bravery of the army was combined with the greatest distaste for what he had seen of the way its great qualities were misused.  In the conduct of this great enterprise he had seen a deplorable levity of outlook, a fatal lack of decision, an absence of any reasoned plan.