"I appeal to you in the name of my as yet unwritten poems, my masterpieces for which France, for which the whole brotherhood of letters, so anxiously waits, to put a term to this appalling chastisement!"
"Delicious!" said Helen, under her breath.
"Your classicism is the natural complement of my mediævalism. The elasticity, the concreteness, of your temperament fertilised the too-brooding introspectiveness of my own. It lightened the reverence which I experience in the contemplation of my own nature. It induced in me the hint of frivolity which is necessary to procure action. Our union was as that of high-noon and impenetrable night. I anticipated extraordinary consequences."
"Marriage of a butterfly and a bat? Yes, the progeny should be surprising, little animals certainly," commented Madame de Vallorbes.
"In deserting me you have rendered me impotent. That is a crime. It is an atrocity. You assassinate my genius."
"Then, indeed, I have reason to congratulate myself on my ingenuity," she returned, "since I succeeded in the assassination of the non-existent!"
"You, who have praised it a thousand times—you deny the existence of my genius?" almost shrieked M. Destournelle. He was very much in earnest, and in a very sorry case. His limbs twitched. He appeared on the verge of an hysteric seizure. To plague him thus was a charmingly pretty sport, but one safest carried on with closed doors—not in so public a spot.
"I do not deny the existence of anything, save your right to make a scene and render me ridiculous as you repeatedly did at Pisa."
"Then you must return to me."
"Oh! la, la!" cried Helen.