could do
the honours as hostess.

"Do you think the beautiful lady is in love with the Master?"

"You have been reading the _feuilletons_ of the _Petit Journal_ and your
head is full of sentimental nonsense," I cried.

"It is not nonsense for a woman to love the Master."

"Oho!" I exclaimed teasingly, "perhaps you are in love with him too."

She turned her back on me and began to clean a spotless casserole.

"_Mange ton omelette_," she said.

My meal over, I went to Paragot's room. I found him in bed, not as usual
pipe in mouth and a tattered volume in his hand, but lying on his back,
his arms crossed beneath his head, staring into the white curtains of
which Blanquette was so proud.

"My son," said he, after he had enquired after my welfare and my lunch
and advised me as to cooling medicaments wherewith to mitigate a certain
pimplous condition of cheek, "My son, I want you to make me a promise.
Swear that if a hitch occurs in your scheme of the cosmos, you will not
break up your furniture with a crusader's mace. Such a proceeding has
infinite consequences of effraction. It disrupts your existence and ends
with the irreparable smash of your porcelain pipe." Whereupon he asked
me for a cigarette and began to smoke reflectively.

"One ought to order one's scheme so that no hitch can occur," said I.

"As far as I can gather from the theologians that is beyond the power
even of the Almighty," said Paragot.

Blanquette appeared with the morning absinthe.

"The hitch, my son, in my case was beyond mortal control," he said
looking up at the bed-curtains. "You may think that I caused it in the
first place. You heard me last night accused of cruelty. You, discreet
little image that you are, know more about things than I thought. And
yet you must wonder, now that you are nearly a man, what can be, what
can have been between this disreputable hairy scallywag who is eating
the bread of idleness and," with a sip of his absinthe, "drinking the
waters of destruction, and that fair creature of dainty life. Don't
judge anyone, my little Asticot '_Hi sumus, qui omnibus veris falsa
quaedam esse dicamus, tanta similitudine, ut in iis nulla insit certe
judicandi et assentiendi nota._' That is Cicero, an author to whom I
regret I have not been able to introduce you, and it means that the
false is so mingled with the true and looks so like it, that there is no
sure mark whereby we may distinguish one from the other. It is a damn