Of course they were rooting them out.

It didn’t matter to me.  One supposes that that sort of native exists for that sort of thing—­to be rooted out by men of good-will, with careers to make.  The point was that that was what they were really doing out there—­rooting out the barbarians as well as the barbarism, and proving themselves worthy of their hire.  And I had been writing them up and was no better than the farcical governor of a department who would write on the morrow to protest that that was what they did not do.  You see I had a sort of personal pride in those days; and preferred to think of myself as a decent person.  I knew that people would say the same sort of thing about me that they said about all the rest of them.  I couldn’t very well protest.  I had been scratching the backs of all sorts of creatures; out of friendship, out of love—­for all sorts of reasons.  This was only a sort of last straw—­or perhaps it was the sight of her that had been the last straw.  It seemed naively futile to have been wasting my time over Mrs. Hartly and those she stood for, when there was something so different in the world—­something so like a current of east wind.

That vein of thought kept me awake, and a worse came to keep it company.  The men from the next room came home—­students, I suppose.  They talked gaily enough, their remarks interspersed by the thuds of falling boots and the other incomprehensible noises of the night.  Through the flimsy partition I caught half sentences in that sort of French intonation that is so impossible to attain.  It reminded me of the voices of the two men at the Opera.  I began to wonder what they had been saying—­what they could have been saying that concerned me and affected the little correspondent to interfere.  Suddenly the thing dawned upon me with the startling clearness of a figure in a complicated pattern—­a clearness from which one cannot take one’s eyes.

It threw everything—­the whole world—­into more unpleasant relations with me than even the Greenland affair.  They had not been talking about my aunt and her Salon, but about my ... my sister.  She was De Mersch’s “Anglaise.”  I did not believe it, but probably all Paris—­the whole world—­said she was.  And to the whole world I was her brother!  Those two men who had looked at me over their shoulders had shrugged and said, “Oh, he’s ...”  And the whole world wherever I went would whisper in asides, “Don’t you know Granger?  He’s the brother.  De Mersch employs him.”

I began to understand everything; the woman in de Mersch’s room with her “Eschingan-Grangeur-r-r”; the deference of the little Jew—­the man who knew. He knew that I—­that I, who patronised him, was a person to stand well with because of my—­my sister’s hold over de Mersch.  I wasn’t, of course, but you can’t understand how the whole thing maddened me all the same.  I hated the world—­this world of people who whispered and were whispered to,