ways of cooking eggs, en cocotte is the best."

"Heavens! how empty I was!" he said presently. "What a meal I'm making!
It's really a very healthy life, this of mine, Victoire. I feel much
better already."

"Oh, yes; it's all very well to talk," said Victoire, in a scolding
tone; for since he was better, she felt, as a good woman should, that
the time had come to put in a word out of season. "But, all the same,
you're trying to kill yourself--that's what you're doing. Just because
you're young you abuse your youth. It won't last for ever; and you'll
be sorry you used it up before it's time. And this life of lies and
thefts and of all kinds of improper things--I suppose it's going to
begin all over again. It's no good your getting a lesson. It's just
thrown away upon you."

"What I want next is a bath," said Lupin.

"It's all very well your pretending not to listen to me, when you know
very well that I'm speaking for your good," she went on, raising her
voice a little. "But I tell you that all this is going to end badly. To
be a thief gives you no position in the world--no position at all--and
when I think of what you made me do the night before last, I'm just
horrified at myself."

"We'd better not talk about that--the mess you made of it! It was
positively excruciating!" said Lupin.

"And what did you expect? I'm an honest woman, I am!" said Victoire
sharply. "I wasn't brought up to do things like that, thank goodness!
And to begin at my time of life!"

"It's true, and I often ask myself how you bring yourself to stick to
me," said Lupin, in a reflective, quite impersonal tone. "Please pour
me out another cup of coffee."

"That's what I'm always asking myself," said Victoire, pouring out the
coffee. "I don't know--I give it up. I suppose it is because I'm fond
of you."

"Yes, and I'm very fond of you, my dear Victoire," said Lupin, in a
coaxing tone.

"And then, look you, there are things that there's no understanding. I
often talked to your poor mother about them. Oh, your poor mother!
Whatever would she have said to these goings-on?"

Lupin helped himself to another cutlet; his eves twinkled and he said,
"I'm not sure that she would have been very much surprised. I always
told her that I was going to punish society for the way it had treated
her. Do you think she would have been surprised?"

"Oh, nothing you did would have surprised her," said Victoire. "When
you were quite a little boy you were alwa