hew is degenerate; that he
reproduces from four generations back, his great-great-grandmother the
dear woman to whom we sometimes take him, and with whom he likes so much
to be? No! there is no longer any family possible, if people begin to
lay bare everything--the nerves of this one, the muscles of that. It is
enough to disgust one with living!"

Clotilde, standing in her long black blouse, had listened to her
grandmother attentively. She had grown very serious; her arms hung by
her sides, her eyes were fixed upon the ground. There was silence for a
moment; then she said slowly:

"It is science, grandmother."

"Science!" cried Felicite, trotting about again. "A fine thing, their
science, that goes against all that is most sacred in the world! When
they shall have demolished everything they will have advanced greatly!
They kill respect, they kill the family, they kill the good God!"

"Oh! don't say that, madame!" interrupted Martine, in a grieved voice,
her narrow devoutness wounded. "Do not say that M. Pascal kills the good
God!"

"Yes, my poor girl, he kills him. And look you, it is a crime, from the
religious point of view, to let one's self be damned in that way. You do
not love him, on my word of honor! No, you do not love him, you two who
have the happiness of believing, since you do nothing to bring him back
to the right path. Ah! if I were in your place, I would split that press
open with a hatchet. I would make a famous bonfire with all the insults
to the good God which it contains!"

She had planted herself before the immense press and was measuring
it with her fiery glance, as if to take it by assault, to sack it, to
destroy it, in spite of the withered and fragile thinness of her eighty
years. Then, with a gesture of ironical disdain:

"If, even with his science, he could know everything!"

Clotilde remained for a moment absorbed in thought, her gaze lost in
vacancy. Then she said in an undertone, as if speaking to herself:

"It is true, he cannot know everything. There is always something else
below. That is what irritates me; that is what makes us quarrel: for I
cannot, like him, put the mystery aside. I am troubled by it, so much
so that I suffer cruelly. Below, what wills and acts in the shuddering
darkness, all the unknown forces--"

Her voice had gradually become lower and now dropped to an indistinct
murmur.

Then Martine, whose face for a moment past had worn a somber expression,
interr