f the antechamber and saw Kranitski.

"Oh, te voila aussi, vieux beau!" (Oh, here thou art too, old
beau!) She sprang toward the cathedra, and, wringing her hands,
exclaimed:

"What a funereal face!" And she spoke on, or rather babbled on in
French: "Hast disappointments? That is bad! But one must not
think of them. Do as I do. I have disappointments, but I mock at
them. This is how I treat disappointments."

She made a stop so elastic that her little foot flew into the
air, and she touched Kranitski's chin with the point of her shoe.
That was a model indication of the method with which one should
treat disappointments.

"Now adieu to the company!" cried she, and rattling her bracelets
she vanished.

In the chamber there was silence again, in the midst of which
Tristan gave a knightly bow to Isolde, and the monk Alberich let
himself down into the jaws of hell; "Triumph of Death" spread her
bat-wings, and the saints with their golden haloes crossed their
pale hands on their bright robes.

The baron was sitting before the organ with his head dropped to
his breast. Kranitski, buried in the cathedra, panted aloud for
some seconds till he said, with a complaining voice:

"It is abominable! I do not wish a cocotte to throw her foot on
my neck when I am thinking of eternity. What confounded tastes
you have! Immediately after leaving Lili Kerth to play that
divine Bach. Nonsense! mixture! I am not a monk, far from it--but
such shaking up in one bottle of the profane and the sacred, no,
that is vileness swaddled in art. Yes, yes, I beg forgiveness
once more, but in the Holy Scriptures something is said about a
gold ring in a pig's nose. Voila!"

The baron smiled under his ruddy mustache and said, after a
while:

"That is subtle and not to be understood by everyone. Bach after
Lili Kerth--that is the bite, that is the irony of things. Do you
know Baudelaire's quatrain?"

He stood up, and, without declamation, even carelessly, through
his nose and teeth, gave the quatrain:

"Quand chez le debauche l'aube blanche et vermeil,

Entre en societe de l'Ideal rongeur,

Par l'operation d'un mystere vengeur,

Dans la brute assoupie un Ange se reveille."

With his hands in the pockets of his flannel sack he paced
through the room.

Maryan had translated that quatrain quite beautifully. Without
interrupting his pacing he repeated the translation.

The bell rang in the antechamber; Maryan entered the
drawing-room. He