He arose and paced across the studio in agitation. Gesticulating and angry, he upset the chairs and paste-boards, ripped some of his sketches with a kick. I thought he was going mad. His bloodshot eyes rolled wildly; he was pale, and the words were coming out of his drawn-up mouth in a violent jumble. "For men to be born of woman ... men!... How irrational! For men to be conceived in an impure womb!... For men to gorge themselves with woman's vices, with her imbecile, ferocious appetites, to have sucked the sap of life from her nefarious breasts! Mother!... Ah! yes, mother!... Divinized mother, eh? Mother who creates us, sick and wasted race that we are, who stifles the man in the child and hurls us nailless and toothless, stupid and tamed, upon the bedstead of a mistress and the nuptial bed!..." Lirat stopped for a moment; he was choking. Then, bringing his hands together and knotting his crisp fingers in the air, as if gripping an imaginary neck, he shouted madly, terribly: "This is what should be done with them, all of them, all of them!...Do you understand? ... eh ... tell me?... All of them!..." And he began pacing back and forth again, swearing, stamping his feet. But the last shout of anger had evidently relieved him. "Come now, my dear Lirat, calm yourself," I said to him. "What's the use of getting excited, and over what, I ask you? Come now, you are not a woman." "That's true, too, but you provoked me with this Juliette.... How does this Juliette concern you anyway?" "Was it not natural on my part to want to know the name of the person to whom you had introduced me?... And then, frankly, pending the invention of some other machine than woman for breeding children ..." "Pending that... I am a brute," interrupted Lirat, who again seated himself before his easel, a little ashamed of himself, and in a quiet voice asked: "Dear little Mintié, would you mind sitting for me a little. That won't bore you, will it? For only ten minutes."