“Oh, I am quite prepared to shock Madame d’Outreville, you know.  That’s on the cards.  I expect to shock a great many people.”

M. de Bellegarde examined for a moment the stitching on the back of one of his gloves.  Then, without looking up, “We don’t offer you money,” he said.  “That we supposed to be useless.”

Newman, turning away, took a few turns about the room and then came back.  “What do you offer me?  By what I can make out, the generosity is all to be on my side.”

The marquis dropped his arms at his side and held his head a little higher.  “What we offer you is a chance—­a chance that a gentleman should appreciate.  A chance to abstain from inflicting a terrible blot upon the memory of a man who certainly had his faults, but who, personally, had done you no wrong.”

“There are two things to say to that,” said Newman.  “The first is, as regards appreciating your ‘chance,’ that you don’t consider me a gentleman.  That’s your great point you know.  It’s a poor rule that won’t work both ways.  The second is that—­well, in a word, you are talking great nonsense!”

Newman, who in the midst of his bitterness had, as I have said, kept well before his eyes a certain ideal of saying nothing rude, was immediately somewhat regretfully conscious of the sharpness of these words.  But he speedily observed that the marquis took them more quietly than might have been expected.  M. de Bellegarde, like the stately ambassador that he was, continued the policy of ignoring what was disagreeable in his adversary’s replies.  He gazed at the gilded arabesques on the opposite wall, and then presently transferred his glance to Newman, as if he too were a large grotesque in a rather vulgar system of chamber-decoration.  “I suppose you know that as regards yourself it won’t do at all.”

“How do you mean it won’t do?”

“Why, of course you damn yourself.  But I suppose that’s in your programme.  You propose to throw mud at us; you believe, you hope, that some of it may stick.  We know, of course, it can’t,” explained the marquis in a tone of conscious lucidity; “but you take the chance, and are willing at any rate to show that you yourself have dirty hands.”

“That’s a good comparison; at least half of it is,” said Newman.  “I take the chance of something sticking.  But as regards my hands, they are clean.  I have taken the matter up with my finger-tips.”

M. de Bellegarde looked a moment into his hat.  “All our friends are quite with us,” he said.  “They would have done exactly as we have done.”

“I shall believe that when I hear them say it.  Meanwhile I shall think better of human nature.”

The marquis looked into his hat again.  “Madame de Cintre was extremely fond of her father.  If she knew of the existence of the few written words of which you propose to make this scandalous use, she would demand of you proudly for his sake to give it up to her, and she would destroy it without reading it.”