o see her daughter."

"Ah! She has a daughter, then?"

"A daughter! A marvel, my dear man. She is the principal attraction
of the den to-day. Tall, magnificent, just ripe, eighteen years old,
as fair as her mother is dark, always merry, always ready for an
entertainment, always laughing, and ready to dance like mad. Who
will be the lucky man, to capture her, or who has already done so?
Nobody can tell that. She has ten of us in her train, all hoping."

"Such a daughter in the hands of a woman like the Marquise is a
fortune. And they play the game together, the two charmers. No one
knows just what they are planning. Perhaps they are waiting for a
better bargain than I should prove. But I tell you that I shall
close the bargain if I ever get a chance."

"That girl Yvette absolutely baffles me, moreover. She is a mystery.
If she is not the most complete monster of astuteness and perversity
that I have ever seen, she certainly is the most marvelous
phenomenon of innocence that can be imagined. She lives in that
atmosphere of infamy with a calm and triumphing ease which is either
wonderfully profligate or entirely artless. Strange scion of an
adventuress, cast upon the muck-heap of that set, like a magnificent
plant nurtured upon corruption, or rather like the daughter of some
noble race, of some great artist, or of some grand lord, of some
prince or dethroned king, tossed some evening into her mother's
arms, nobody can make out what she is nor what she thinks. But you
are going to see her."

Saval began to laugh and said: "You are in love with her."

"No. I am on the list, which is not precisely the same thing. I will
introduce you to my most serious rivals. But the chances are in my
favor. I am in the lead, and some little distinction is shown to
me."

"You are in love," Saval repeated.

"No. She disquiets me, seduces and disturbs me, attracts and
frightens me away. I mistrust her as I would a trap, and I long for
her as I long for a sherbet when I am thirsty. I yield to her charm,
and I only approach her with the apprehension that I would feel
concerning a man who was known to be a skillful thief. To her
presence I have an irrational impulse toward belief in her possible
purity and a very reasonable mistrust of her not less probable
trickery. I feel myself in contact with an abnormal being, beyond
the pale of natural laws, an exquisite or detestable creature--I
don't know which."

For the third time Saval sai