f anger rushed to his face--anger of the quality
that has its source in shame. In a second he was on his feet before her,
towering to the full of his lean height. The words came from him in
a hot stream, which for reckless passion by far outvied his erstwhile
amatory address.

"My station?" he cried, throwing wide his arms. "What fault lies in
my station? I am a secretary, a scholar, and so, by academic right, a
gentleman. Nay, Mademoiselle, never laugh; do not mock me yet. In what
do you find me less a man than any of the vapid caperers that fill your
father's salon? Is not my shape as good? Are not my arms as strong, my
hands as deft, my wits as keen, and my soul as true? Aye," he pursued
with another wild wave of his long arms, "my attributes have all these
virtues, and yet you scorn me--you scorn me because of my station, so
you say!"

How she had angered him! All the pent-up gall of years against the
supercilia of the class from which she sprang surged in that moment to
his lips. He bethought him now of the thousand humiliations his proud
spirit had suffered at their hands when he noted the disdain with which
they addressed him, speaking to him--because he was compelled to carve
his living with a quill--as though he were less than mire. It was not so
much against her scorn of him that he voiced his bitter grievance, but
against the entire noblesse of France, which denied him the right to
carry a high head because he had not been born of Madame la Duchesse,
Madame la Marquise, or Madame la Comtesse. All the great thoughts of a
wondrous transformation, which had been sown in him by the revolutionary
philosophers he had devoured with such appreciation, welled up now, and
such scraps of that infinity of thought as could find utterance he cast
before the woman who had scorned him for his station. Presumptuous he
had accounted himself--but only until she had found him so. By that the
presumption, it seemed, had been lifted from him, and he held that what
he had said to her of the love he bore her was no more than by virtue of
his manhood he had the right to say.

She drew back before him, and shrank in some measure of fear, for he
looked very fierce. Moreover, he had said things which professed him a
revolutionist, and the revolutionists, whilst being a class which she
had been taught to despise and scorn, dealt, she knew, in a violence
which it might be ill to excite.

"Monsieur," she faltered, and with her hand she