njustly
by the hollow right of heredity. It had been distributed as evenly as
might be throughout the State, and if men had only paused there, all
would have been well. But our impetus carried us too far, the privileged
orders goaded us on by their very opposition, and the result is the
horror of which yesterday you saw no more than the beginnings. No,
no," he ended. "Careers there may be for venal place-seekers, for
opportunists; but none for a man who desires to respect himself. It is
time to go. I make no sacrifice in going."

"But where will you go? What will you do?"

"Oh, something. Consider that in four years I have been lawyer,
politician, swordsman, and buffoon--especially the latter. There is
always a place in the world for Scaramouche. Besides, do you know that
unlike Scaramouche I have been oddly provident? I am the owner of a
little farm in Saxony. I think that agriculture might suit me. It is a
meditative occupation; and when all is said, I am not a man of action. I
haven't the qualities for the part."

She looked up into his face, and there was a wistful smile in her deep
blue eyes.

"Is there any part for which you have not the qualities, I wonder?"

"Do you really? Yet you cannot say that I have made a success of any
of those which I have played. I have always ended by running away. I
am running away now from a thriving fencing-academy, which is likely to
become the property of Le Duc. That comes of having gone into politics,
from which I am also running away. It is the one thing in which I really
excel. That, too, is an attribute of Scaramouche."

"Why will you always be deriding yourself?" she wondered.

"Because I recognize myself for part of this mad world, I suppose. You
wouldn't have me take it seriously? I should lose my reason utterly if I
did; especially since discovering my parents."

"Don't, Andre!" she begged him. "You are insincere, you know."

"Of course I am. Do you expect sincerity in man when hypocrisy is the
very keynote of human nature? We are nurtured on it; we are schooled in
it, we live by it; and we rarely realize it. You have seen it rampant
and out of hand in France during the past four years--cant and hypocrisy
on the lips of the revolutionaries, cant and hypocrisy on the lips of
the upholders of the old regime; a riot of hypocrisy out of which in
the end is begotten chaos. And I who criticize it all on this beautiful
God-given morning am the rankest and most contempt