The debtor, albeit he was still a young man, did not appear unduly impressed. The table was across his knees, but he rose as far as it would permit and removed his hat with a flourish that sent a spray of water directly over Madame's monument of hair. Disregarding the blatant fact that she was quite the most remarkable feature of the room, he vowed that he had not observed her upon entering, was desolated because of his oversight and ravished now to have the pleasure of once more beholding her in all her accustomed grace and charm. Madame shrugged her shoulders higher than the walls of the cage. "Sixty francs, twenty-five," she said, without looking up from her task. Ah, yes: his little account. Monsieur recalled that: there was a little account; but, so truly as his name was Seraphin and his passion Art, what a marvelous head Madame had for figures. It was of an exactitude magnificent! When he paused, Madame said: "Sixty francs, twenty-five." "But surely, Madame----" Seraphin Dieudonné was politely amazed; he did not desire to credit her with an impoliteness, and yet she seemed to imply that, unless he paid this absurdly little sum, there might be some delay in serving him in this so excellent establishment. "_C'est ça_," said Madame. "The delay will be entire." "Incomprehensible!" Seraphin put a bony hand to his heart. "Do you not know--all the world of the _Quartier_ knows--that I have, Madame, but three days' work more upon my _magnum opus_--a week at the utmost--and that then it can sell for not a sou less than fifteen thousand francs?" Madame's face never changed expression when she talked; it always seemed set at the only angle that would balance her monument of hair. She now said: "What all the world of the _Quartier_ knows is that your last _magnum opus_ you sold to that simpleton Fourget in the rue St. André des Arts; that even from him you could squeeze but a hundred francs for it; and that he has not yet been able to find a customer." At first Seraphin seemed slow to credit the scorn that Madame was at such pains to reveal. He made one valiant effort to overlook it, and failed; then he made an effort no less valiant to meet her with the ridiculous majesty in which he habitually draped himself. It was as if, unable to make her believe in him, he at least wanted her to believe that his long struggle with poverty and an indifferent public had served only to increase his confidence in his own genius and to rear between him and the world a wall through which the arrows of the scornful could hardly pass. But this attempt succeeded no more than its predecessor: as he half stood, half bent before this landlady of a fifth-rate café, a tardy pink crept up his white face and painted the skin over his cheek-bones; his eyelids fluttered, and his mouth worked. The man was hungry. "Madeleine!" whispered Pasbeaucoup, compassion for the debtor almost overcoming fear of the wife. Seraphin wet his lips. "Madame----" he began.