“Keep that sublime je m’en fich’isme up when I’m dead and buried,” said I, “and you’ll pull through your life all right.  The only thing you must avoid is the pursuit of eumoiriety.”

“What on earth is that?” she asked.

“The last devastating vanity,” said I.

And so it is.

“When you are gone,” she said bravely, “I shall remember how strong and true you were.  It will make me strong too.”

I acquiesced silently in her proposition.  In this age of flippancy and scepticism, if a human soul proclaims sincerely its faith in the divinity of a rabbit, in God’s name don’t disturb it.  It is something whereto to refer his aspirations, his resolves; it is a court of arbitration, at the lowest, for his spiritual disputes; and the rabbit will be as effective an oracle as any other.  For are not all religions but the strivings of the spirit towards crystallisation at some point outside the environment of passions and appetites which is the flesh, so that it can work untrammelled:  and are not all gods but the accidental forms, conditioned by circumstance, which this crystallisation takes?  All gods in their anthropo-, helio-, thero-, or what-not-morphic forms are false; but, on the other hand, all gods in their spiritual essence are true.  So I do not deprecate my prospective unique position in Lola Brandt’s hagiology.  It was better for her soul that I should occupy it.  Even if I were about to live my normal life out, like any other hearty human, marry and beget children, I doubt whether I should attempt to shake my wife’s faith in my heroical qualities.

This was but a fragment of one among countless talks.  Some were lighter in tone, others darker, the mood of man being much like a child’s balloon which rises or falls as the strata of air are more rarefied or more dense.  Perhaps during the time of strain, the atmosphere was more often rarefied, and our conversation had the day’s depressing incidents for its topics.  We rarely spoke of the dead man.  He was scarcely a subject for panegyric, and it was useless to dwell on the memory of his degradation.  I think we only once talked of him deeply and at any length, and that was on the day of the funeral.  His brother, a manufacturer at Clermont-Ferrand, and a widowed aunt, apparently his only two surviving relatives, arrived in Algiers just in time to attend the ceremony.  They had seen the report of the murder in the newspapers and had started forthwith.  The brother, during an interview with Lola, said bitter things to her, reproaching her with the man’s downfall, and cast on her the responsibility of his death.

“He spoke,” she said, “as if I had suggested the murder and practically put the knife into the poor crazy little fellow’s hand.”

The Vauvenardes must have been an amiable family.

“Before I came,” she said a little while later, “I still had some tenderness for him—­a woman has for the only man that has been—­really—­in her life.  I wish I could feel it now.  I wish I could feel some respect even.  But I can’t.  If I could, it would lessen the horror that has got hold of me to my bones.”