“Listen to me, Lewis: you trusted, and have been deceived; and, by a not unnatural revulsion of feeling, your faith in man’s honour and woman’s constancy is for the time being destroyed; and just at the very moment when you most require the assistance of your old friends, and the determination to gain new ones, you dislike and despise your fellow-creatures, and are at war in your heart with society. Now this must not be, and at the risk of paining you, I am going to tell you the truth.” “I know what you would say,” interrupted Lewis vehemently: “you would tell me that my affection was misplaced--that I loved a girl beneath me in mind and station--that I trusted a man whom I deemed my friend, but who, with a specious exterior, was a cold-hearted, designing villain. It was so; I own it; I see it _now_, when it is too late; but I did not see it at the time when the knowledge might have availed me. And why may not this happen again? There is but one way to prevent it: I will avoid the perfidious sex--except Rose, no woman shall ever----” “My dear boy, don’t talk such rubbish,” interposed his friend; “there are plenty of right-minded, lovable women in the world, I don’t doubt, though I can’t say I have much to do with them, seeing that they are not usually addicted to practical science, and therefore don’t come in my way--household angels, with their wings clipped, and their manners and their draperies modernised, but with all the brightness and purity of heaven still lingering about them,--that’s my notion of women as they should be, and as I believe many are, despite your having been jilted by as arrant a little coquette as ever I had the luck to behold; and as to the Baron, it would certainly be a satisfaction to kick him well; but we can’t obtain all we wish for in this life. What are you grinning at? You don’t mean to say you _have_ polished him off?” In reply, Lewis drew his left arm out of his coat, and rolling up his shirt-sleeve above the elbow, exposed to view a newly-healed wound in the fleshy part of his arm, then said quietly, “We fought with small swords in a ring formed by the students; we were twenty minutes at it; he marked me as you see; at length I succeeded in disarming him--in the struggle he fell, and placing my foot upon his neck and my sword point to his heart, I forced him to confess his treachery, and beg his hateful life of me before them all.” Frere’s face grew dark. “Duelling!” he said. “I thought your principles would have preserved you from that vice--I thought----” A growl from Faust, whose quick ear had detected a footstep on the stairs, interrupted him, and in another moment a voice exclaimed, “Hello, Frere! where are you, man?” and the speaker, without waiting for an answer, opened the door and entered.