All the conflicting, frantic arguments that men make when they are about to commit some foolish action were at war in Jose's brain. The more so as he did not attempt to analyze his feelings. He passed, near this pretty woman whose finger-tips he hardly dared kiss, the most delicious summer of his life. Once, however, on going out with Marianne in the Champs-Elysees, he had met the old Dujarrier with the swollen eyelids and the yellow hair that he had known formerly. One of his friends, the Marquis Vergano, had committed suicide at twenty for this woman who was old enough to be his mother. The Dujarrier had stopped and greeted Marianne, but as she remarked herself, a thousand bows and scrapes were thrown away, for Rosas had hardly noticed her with a glacial look. "Why do you return that woman's salutation?" he at once asked Marianne. "I need her. She has done me services." "That is surprising! I thought her incapable of doing anything but harm." He did not dream of Mademoiselle Kayser's coming in contact with courtesans. In the tiny, virtuous room in Rue Cuvier, Rosas thought that Marianne was in her true surroundings. She would frequently sit at the piano--one of the few pieces of furniture contained in this apartment,--and play for Rosas Oriental melodies that would transport him far away in thought, to the open desert, by the slow lulling of David's _Caravane_, then abruptly change to that familiar air, that rondeau of the Varietes that he hummed yonder, on his dunghill, forsaken-- "Voyez-vous, la-bas, Cette maison blanche--" "I love that music-hall air!" she said. He now no longer meditated resuming travel, or quitting Paris. Mademoiselle Kayser's hold on him grew more certain every day. The suspicion of odd mystery that enveloped this girl intensified his passion. He sometimes asked her what her uncle was doing. "He? Why, he has obtained, thanks to Monsieur Vaudrey, the decoration of a hydropathic establishment, _Les Thermes des Batignolles_. He has commenced the cartoon for a fresco: _Massage Moralizing the People_. We shall see that in his studio." "Do you know," Marianne continued, "what I would like to see?" "What, then?" "Spain, your own country. Where were you born, Rosas?" "At Toledo. I own the family chateau there." "With portraits and armor?" "Yes, with portraits and armor." "Well, I would like to go to Toledo, to see that chateau. It must be magnificent."