"The farther away from
Jean Jacques the better--that is what she thinks."

"No, you are wrong, my friend," rejoined M. Fille. "She said to Madame
Poucette's sister"--he held up the letter--"that when they had proved
they could live without anybody's help they would come back to see you.
Zoe thought that, having taken her life in her own hands, she ought to
justify herself before she asked your forgiveness and a place at your
table. She felt that you could only love her and be glad of her, if her
man was independent of you. It is a proud and sensitive soul--but there
it is!"

"It is romance, it is quixotism--ah, heart of God, what quixotism!"
exclaimed Jean Jacques.

"She gets her romance and quixotism from Jean Jacques Barbille,"
retorted the Clerk of the Court. "She does more feeling than
thinking--like you."

Jean Jacques' heart was bleeding, but he drew himself up proudly, and
caught his hand away from the warm palm of Poucette's widow. As his
affairs crumbled his pride grew more insistent. M. Fille had challenged
his intellect--his intellect!

"My life has been a procession of practical things," he declared
oracularly. "I have been a man of business who designs. I am no dreamer.
I think. I act. I suffer. I have been the victim of romance, not
its interpreter. Mercy of God, what has broken my life, what but
romance--romance, first with one and then with another! More feeling
than thinking, Maitre Fille--you say that? Why the Barbilles have ever
in the past built up life on a basis of thought and action, and I have
added philosophy--the science of thought and act. Jean Jacques Barbille
has been the man of design and the man of action also. Don Quixote was a
fool, a dreamer, but Jean Jacques is no Don Quixote. He is a man who has
done things, but also he is a man who has been broken on the wheel of
life. He is a man whose heart-strings have been torn--"

He had worked himself up into a fit of eloquence and revolt. He was
touched by the rod of desperation, which makes the soul protest that it
is right when it knows that it is wrong.

Suddenly, breaking off his speech, he threw up his hands and made for
the door.

"I will fight it out alone!" he declared with rough emotion, and at the
door he turned towards them again. He looked at them both as though he
would dare them to contradict him. The restless fire of his eyes seemed
to dart from one to the other.

"That's the way it is," said the widow of Palass Pouc