and talk and see something
different, I could not say that. But I always pay, monsieur le cure, I
always pay. From the moment you pay, without anyone seeing or knowing
you, no one can get you into trouble."

The cure did not insist, and gave him absolution.

Theodule Sabot did the work on the chancel, and goes to communion every
month.

THE WRONG HOUSE

Quartermaster Varajou had obtained a week's leave to go and visit his
sister, Madame Padoie. Varajou, who was in garrison at Rennes and was
leading a pretty gay life, finding himself high and dry, wrote to his
sister saying that he would devote a week to her. It was not that he
cared particularly for Mme. Padoie, a little moralist, a devotee,
and always cross; but he needed money, needed it very badly, and he
remembered that, of all his relations, the Padoies were the only ones
whom he had never approached on the subject.

Pere Varajou, formerly a horticulturist at Angers, but now retired from
business, had closed his purse strings to his scapegrace son and had
hardly seen him for two years. His daughter had married Padoie, a former
treasury clerk, who had just been appointed tax collector at Vannes.

Varajou, on leaving the train, had some one direct him to the house of
his brother-in-law, whom he found in his office arguing with the Breton
peasants of the neighborhood. Padoie rose from his seat, held out his
hand across the table littered with papers, murmured, "Take a chair.
I will be at liberty in a moment," sat down again and resumed his
discussion.

The peasants did not understand his explanations, the collector did not
understand their line of argument. He spoke French, they spoke Breton,
and the clerk who acted as interpreter appeared not to understand
either.

It lasted a long time, a very long time. Varajou looked at his
brother-in-law and thought: "What a fool!" Padoie must have been almost
fifty. He was tall, thin, bony, slow, hairy, with heavy arched eyebrows.
He wore a velvet skull cap with a gold cord vandyke design round it.
His look was gentle, like his actions. His speech, his gestures, his
thoughts, all were soft. Varajou said to himself, "What a fool!"

He, himself, was one of those noisy roysterers for whom the greatest
pleasures in life are the cafe and abandoned women. He understood
nothing outside of these conditions of existence.

A boisterous braggart, filled with contempt for the rest of the world,
he despised the entire univ