He interrupted himself for a comment.  “I am something like that myself.  I believe it’s a purely professional feeling.  Carry one’s point whatever it is.  Normally I couldn’t kill a fly.  My sensibility is too acute for that.  My heart is too tender also.  Much too tender.  I am a Republican.  I am a Red.  As to all our present masters and governors, all those people you are trying to turn round your little finger, they are all horrible Royalists in disguise.  They are plotting the ruin of all the institutions to which I am devoted.  But I have never tried to spoil your little game, Rita.  After all, it’s but a little game.  You know very well that two or three fearless articles, something in my style, you know, would soon put a stop to all that underhand backing of your king.  I am calling him king because I want to be polite to you.  He is an adventurer, a blood-thirsty, murderous adventurer, for me, and nothing else.  Look here, my dear child, what are you knocking yourself about for?  For the sake of that bandit?  Allons donc!  A pupil of Henry Allegre can have no illusions of that sort about any man.  And such a pupil, too!  Ah, the good old days in the Pavilion!  Don’t think I claim any particular intimacy.  It was just enough to enable me to offer my services to you, Rita, when our poor friend died.  I found myself handy and so I came.  It so happened that I was the first.  You remember, Rita?  What made it possible for everybody to get on with our poor dear Allegre was his complete, equable, and impartial contempt for all mankind.  There is nothing in that against the purest democratic principles; but that you, Rita, should elect to throw so much of your life away for the sake of a Royal adventurer, it really knocks me over.  For you don’t love him.  You never loved him, you know.”

He made a snatch at her hand, absolutely pulled it away from under her head (it was quite startling) and retaining it in his grasp, proceeded to a paternal patting of the most impudent kind.  She let him go on with apparent insensibility.  Meanwhile his eyes strayed round the table over our faces.  It was very trying.  The stupidity of that wandering stare had a paralysing power.  He talked at large with husky familiarity.

“Here I come, expecting to find a good sensible girl who had seen at last the vanity of all those things; half-light in the rooms; surrounded by the works of her favourite poets, and all that sort of thing.  I say to myself:  I must just run in and see the dear wise child, and encourage her in her good resolutions. . .  And I fall into the middle of an intime lunch-party.  For I suppose it is intime.  Eh?  Very?  H’m, yes . . . "

He was really appalling.  Again his wandering stare went round the table, with an expression incredibly incongruous with the words.  It was as though he had borrowed those eyes from some idiot for the purpose of that visit.  He still held Dona Rita’s hand, and, now and then, patted it.