Annette's fingers clenched on the tablecloth. . . . Ah, how she hated him! . . . He had seen her fingers. "I didn't create him just to give him up." "You didn't create him at all," he replied. "Nature created him. She uses you and casts you aside afterward." "I shall not let myself be cast aside." "A battle, then?" "A battle!" He looked her in the face, "You will be beaten," he said. "I know it. One always is. But what's the difference? One fights just the same." Under the cold mask her eyes smiled defiantly. But the blue gaze of the other penetrated her like a stab. She had given herself away. Philippe was a forceful man. His force was part of his genius. He carried it as much into his clinic, in his terrible diagnostics and the sureness of his hand, into the operating-room, as into the acts of his life and his decisions. Accustomed to reading at a glance the depths of human bodies, he had understood Annette completely at once--Annette, her passions, her pride and her troubles, her temperament and her strong nature. And Annette felt that she had been caught. With her helmet fallen so soon, her visor broken, furiously angry, she betrayed henceforth to the eyes of her adversary only an icy armor. In the constriction at her heart, she knew now that the enemy had come. The enemy? Yes, love. . . . (Ah, that insipid word, so far from the cruel force itself! . . .) To the sudden awakening of interest which she had perceived in him, she opposed an ironical inflexibility that very inadequately concealed the hostility she felt. It only completed her self-betrayal. She was too genuine, too passionate. She could not pretend. Her very animosity revealed the depths of her being. Philippe was the only one to see this. He did not attempt to revive the conversation again; he had learned enough, and, with a detached air, recounting to the company one of those bitter, amusing stories that were stamped with his own harsh experience, he measured with his eye the woman he intended to capture. None of the others who were present had observed anything. The Mouton-Chevalliers were regretfully convinced that Annette and Philippe were unsympathetic to each other: between their two characters there was nothing in common. However, in bringing Annette and the Villards together, they had hoped that Annette and Mme. Villard would become friends. "They were made for each other." And so far as that was concerned, they had the pleasure of seeing that they were not mistaken.