speak
seemed weak and useless now.

"Mademoiselle is mistaken" I lied smoothly, "Nothing that I did last
night was on her account."

"Nothing!" she exclaimed sharply, "I do not understand."

"No, nothing," I said, "Pray believe me, anything I did, however foolish,
was solely for myself. I have my own affair to settle with my father."

"Bah!" cried Mademoiselle, tapping her foot on the floor, and oddly
enough my reply seemed to have made her angry, "So you are like all the
rest of them, stupid, narrow, calculating!"

"If Mademoiselle will only listen," I began, strangely puzzled and
singularly contrite.

"Listen to you!" she cried, "No, Monsieur, I have listened to you quite
long enough to know your type. I see now you are quite what I thought you
would be. I say you are entirely ineffective, and must leave your father
alone. You do not understand him. You do not even know him. With me it is
different. I have seen the world. He is temperamental, your father, a
genius in his way, and a little mad, perhaps. Leave him to me, Monsieur,
and it will be quite all right. Last night, it was so sudden, that I was
frightened for a moment. I should have remembered he is erratic and apt
to change his mind. I should have guessed why he changed it. It is you,
Monsieur. You have had a bad effect upon him. You have made him turn
suddenly grotesque. What did you do to him last evening?

"Do to him?" I asked, stupidly enough. "Why, nothing. I listened to him,
Mademoiselle, just as I have been listening to him all this morning."

"And yet," she said, "it is your fault. Usually he is most well behaved.
He is moderate, Monsieur. At Blanzy a glass of wine at dinner was all he
ever desired. For days at a time, I have hardly heard him say a word. The
Marquis would call him the Sphinx, and what has he been doing here?
Drinking bottle after bottle, talking steadily, acting outrageously. What
is more, he has been doing so ever since he spoke of returning home. I
tell you, Monsieur, you must keep away from him, or perhaps he will do
with the paper exactly what he says. Pray do not scowl. Laugh, Monsieur,
it is funny."

"Funny?" I exclaimed, as stupidly as before. Mademoiselle sighed.

"If the Marquis had only lived--how he would have laughed. It was odd,
the sense of humor of the Marquis. Strange how much alike they were, the
Marquis and your father."

"It is pleasant that Mademoiselle and I should have something in
common," I said.