What mischievous tricks blood plays! Over Annette's head the two confederates shook hands. And one of the most striking traits which the frank Annette had transmitted from the grandfather to the grandchild was a remarkable aptitude for dissembling. Not through any need to deceive. Raoul Rivière had enough good-natured contempt for his contemporaries and felt strong enough never to have any fear of showing himself, when it pleased him, quite without disguise. (It had often pleased him, and people would quote ferocious words of his that carried all before them.) No, this was a gratuitous pleasure, a delight in the burlesque, a theatrical tendency, a malicious taste for concealing his moral identity in order to mystify people. The child, innocently of course, had inherited this. His soul, which was still full of inconsistencies and very heterogeneous, with nothing of the buffoon in its depths, had slipped at birth into this malicious attitude, and it used the organs that Nature had made for it. Just as it would have tried its beak, its claws or its wings if it had passed into the body of a woolly or feathered animal, so, enveloped as it were in a fold of one of old Rivière's coats, it revealed once more the wiles of the grandfather. Marc was guarded in the presence of grown-ups, and he could read in them everything that concerned him. On that side his faculty of attention was keen. When he saw what they imagined he was, he became it--at least unless they irritated him or he wanted to amuse himself and was seized with the whim of being contrary. One of his occupations was to take apart the mechanism of these living playthings, look for their hidden springs, their weak points, try them, play with them, make them go. This was not very difficult, for they were stupid and unsuspicious. And first of all, his mother. She puzzled him. There was something enigmatic about her. He had heard allusions to this subject in Sylvie's workshop, when he was sitting under the feet of the working-girls, who were not thinking of him. He did not understand much of it. But this added to the mystery, and he interpreted it. Divining, discovering. In this alert little ferret-like body, motionless, with shining eyes, the mind was always working.