he would never give way.  She was wrong.  He had been victimized.  He had behaved with wisdom and with correctness (save for the detail of throwing the ring into the Thames).  Agg’s warnings and injunctions were ridiculous.  What could he have done that he had not done?  Run away with Marguerite, carry her off?  Silly!  No, he was well out of the affair.  He perceived the limitations of the world in which Marguerite lived.  It was a world too small and too austere for him.  He required the spaciousness and the splendour of the new world in which Irene Wheeler and the Ingrams lived.  Yea, though it was a world that excited the sardonic in him, he liked it.  It flattered authentic, if unsuspected, appetites in him.  Still, the image of Marguerite inhabited his memory.  He saw her as she stood between himself and old Haim in the basement of No. 8.  He heard her....  She was absolutely unlike any other girl; she was so gentle, so acquiescent.  Only she put her lover second to her father....  What would Miss Wheeler think of the basement of No. 8?

The chatterers, apropos of songs in musical comedies, were talking about a French popular song concerning Boulanger.

“You knew Boulanger, didn’t you, Jules?” Miss Wheeler suggested.

M. Defourcambault looked round, content.  He related in English how his father had been in the very centre of the Boulangist movement, and had predicted disaster to the General’s cause from the instant that Madame de Bonnemain came on the scene. (Out of consideration for the girls, M. Defourcambault phrased his narrative with neat discretion.) His grandfather also had been of his father’s opinion, and his grandfather was in the Senate, and had been Minister at Brussels....  He affirmed that Madame de Bonnemain had telegraphed to Boulanger to leave Paris at the very moment when his presence in Paris was essential, and Boulanger had obediently gone.  He said that he always remembered what his mother had said to him:  a clever woman irregularly in love with a man may make his fortune, but a stupid woman is certain to ruin it.  Finally he related how he, Jules Defourcambault, had driven the General’s carriage on a famous occasion through Paris, and how the populace in its frenzy of idolatry had even climbed on to the roof of the carriage.

“And what did you do, then?” George demanded in the hard tone of a cross-examiner.

“I drove straight on,” said M. Defourcambault, returning George’s cold stare.

This close glimpse into history—­into politics and passion—­excited George considerably.  He was furiously envious of M. Defourcambault, who had been in the middle of things all his life, whose father, mother, and grandfather were all in the middle of things.  M. Defourcambault had an immense and unfair advantage over him.  To whatever heights he might rise, George would never be in a position to talk as M. Defourcambault talked of his forbears.  He would always have to stand alone, and to fight