Kendricks leaned back in his seat and laughed scornfully.
"Julien," he exclaimed, "there are times when you are very simple! Do you indeed mean that you would try to deceive even me? You would pretend that I, David Kendricks, of the Post, don't know that Herr Freudenberg and the Prince von Falkenberg, ruler of Germany, are one and the same person? Maker of toys, he calls himself! Maker of fools' palaces, if you like, builder of prison houses, if you will. No man was ever born with less of a conscience, more solely and wholly ambitious both for his country and for himself, than the man with whom you talked to-night. You knew him?"
"Naturally," Julien answered. "We met at Berlin."
"The man is a great genius," Kendricks continued. "No one will deny him that. They speak of his weaknesses. They talk of his drinking bouts, of his plunges into French dissipation. The man hasn't a single dissipated thought in his mind. He moves through this world—this little Paris world—with one idea only. He gets behind the scenes. He comes here secretly, drops hints here and there as a private person, lets himself be considered a Parisian of Parisians. All the time he listens and he drops his cunning words of poison and he works. What are his ambitions? Do you know, Julien?"
"Do you?" Julien asked.
"It seems to me that I have some idea," Kendricks answered. "This is your hotel, isn't it?"
Julien nodded.
"Are you going to stay here?"
Kendricks shook his head.
"I stay at a little hotel in the Rue Taitbout. I stay there because it is full of the weirdest set of foreigners you ever knew. This morning we breakfast together?"