This was only
a sort of last straw--or perhaps it was the sight of her that had been
the last straw. It seemed naively futile to have been wasting my time
over Mrs. Hartly and those she stood for, when there was something so
different in the world--something so like a current of east wind.

That vein of thought kept me awake, and a worse came to keep it company.
The men from the next room came home--students, I suppose. They talked
gaily enough, their remarks interspersed by the thuds of falling boots
and the other incomprehensible noises of the night. Through the flimsy
partition I caught half sentences in that sort of French intonation that
is so impossible to attain. It reminded me of the voices of the two men
at the Opera. I began to wonder what they had been saying--what they
could have been saying that concerned me and affected the little
correspondent to interfere. Suddenly the thing dawned upon me with the
startling clearness of a figure in a complicated pattern--a clearness
from which one cannot take one's eyes.

It threw everything--the whole world--into more unpleasant relations
with me than even the Greenland affair. They had not been talking about
my aunt and her Salon, but about my ... my sister. She was De Mersch's
"_Anglaise_." I did not believe it, but probably all Paris--the whole
world--said she was. And to the whole world I was her brother! Those two
men who had looked at me over their shoulders had shrugged and said,
"Oh, _he's_ ..." And the whole world wherever I went would whisper in
asides, "Don't you know Granger? He's the brother. De Mersch employs
him."

I began to understand everything; the woman in de Mersch's room with
her "Eschingan-Grangeur-r-r"; the deference of the little Jew--the man
who knew. _He_ knew that I--that I, who patronised him, was a person to
stand well with because of my--my sister's hold over de Mersch. I
wasn't, of course, but you can't understand how the whole thing maddened
me all the same. I hated the world--this world of people who whispered
and were whispered to, of men who knew and men who wanted to know--the
shadowy world of people who didn't matter, but whose eyes and voices
were all round one and did somehow matter. I knew well enough how it had
come about. It was de Mersch--the State Founder, with his shamed face
and his pallid hands. She had been attracted by his air of greatness, by
his elective grand-dukedom, by his protestations. Women are like that.
She