ers. Others do not resemble us at all."

She rose and took the General's arm.

On the way to the drawing-room the Princess said:

"Therese is right. Some actions do not express our real selves at all.
They are like the things we do in nightmares."

The nymphs of the tapestries smiled vainly in their faded beauty at the
guests, who did not see them.

Madame Martin served the coffee with her young cousin, Madame Belleme de
Saint-Nom. She complimented Paul Vence on what he had said at the table.

"You talked of Napoleon with a freedom of mind that is rare in the
conversations I hear. I have noticed that children, when they are
handsome, look, when they pout, like Napoleon at Waterloo. You have made
me feel the profound reasons for this similarity."

Then, turning toward Dechartre:

"Do you like Napoleon?"

"Madame, I do not like the Revolution. And Napoleon is the Revolution in
boots."

"Monsieur Dechartre, why did you not say this at dinner? But I see you
prefer to be witty only in tete-a-tetes."

Count Martin-Belleme escorted the men to the smoking-room. Paul Vence
alone remained with the women. Princess Seniavine asked him if he had
finished his novel, and what was the subject of it. It was a study
in which he tried to reach the truth through a series of plausible
conditions.

"Thus," he said, "the novel acquires a moral force which history, in its
heavy frivolity, never had."

She inquired whether the book was written for women. He said it was not.

"You are wrong, Monsieur Vence, not to write for women. A superior man
can do nothing else for them."

He wished to know what gave her that idea.

"Because I see that all the intelligent women love fools."

"Who bore them."

"Certainly! But superior men would weary them more. They would have
more resources to employ in boring them. But tell me the subject of your
novel."

"Do you insist?"

"Oh, I insist upon nothing."

"Well, I will tell you. It is a study of popular manners; the history of
a young workman, sober and chaste, as handsome as a girl, with the mind
of a virgin, a sensitive soul. He is a carver, and works well. At night,
near his mother, whom he loves, he studies, he reads books. In his mind,
simple and receptive, ideas lodge themselves like bullets in a wall. He
has no desires. He has neither the passions nor the vices that attach
us to life. He is solitary and pure. Endowed with strong virtues, he
becomes conceited. He lives among m