ns were free and
equal, but he would have meant what he said. If you had asked him about
education, he would have said that the young must be trained up in
habits of industry and of respect for their parents. Still he would
have set them the example of industry, and he would have been one of the
parents whom they could respect. A state of mind so hopelessly central
is depressing to the English instinct. But then in England a man
announcing these platitudes is generally a fool and a frightened fool,
announcing them out of mere social servility. But Durand was anything
but a fool; he had read all the eighteenth century, and could have
defended his platitudes round every angle of eighteenth-century
argument. And certainly he was anything but a coward: swollen and
sedentary as he was, he could have hit any man back who touched him with
the instant violence of an automatic machine; and dying in a uniform
would have seemed to him only the sort of thing that sometimes
happens. I am afraid it is impossible to explain this monster amid the
exaggerative sects and the eccentric clubs of my country. He was merely
a man.

He lived in a little villa which was furnished well with comfortable
chairs and tables and highly uncomfortable classical pictures and
medallions. The art in his home contained nothing between the two
extremes of hard, meagre designs of Greek heads and Roman togas, and on
the other side a few very vulgar Catholic images in the crudest colours;
these were mostly in his daughter's room. He had recently lost his wife,
whom he had loved heartily and rather heavily in complete silence,
and upon whose grave he was constantly in the habit of placing hideous
little wreaths, made out of a sort of black-and-white beads. To his only
daughter he was equally devoted, though he restricted her a good deal
under a sort of theoretic alarm about her innocence; an alarm which was
peculiarly unnecessary, first, because she was an exceptionally reticent
and religious girl, and secondly, because there was hardly anybody else
in the place.

Madeleine Durand was physically a sleepy young woman, and might easily
have been supposed to be morally a lazy one. It is, however, certain
that the work of her house was done somehow, and it is even more rapidly
ascertainable that nobody else did it. The logician is, therefore,
driven back upon the assumption that she did it; and that lends a sort
of mysterious interest to her personality at the be