The old lady protested that the arm-chair she was sitting in was her own and that she was not going to quit it. “In that case,” went on La Pérouse with a grim chuckle, “_we_ will leave _you_.” Then, turning to me, he repeated in gentler tones, “come, let us leave her.” I made a sketchy and embarrassed bow, and followed him into the next room--the same one in which I had paid him my last visit. “I am glad you heard her,” he said; “that’s what it’s like the whole day long.” He shut the window. “There’s such a noise in the street, one can’t hear oneself speak. I spend my time shutting the windows and Madame de La Pérouse spends hers opening them again. She declares she’s stifling. She always exaggerates. She refuses to realize that it’s hotter out of doors than in. And yet I’ve got a little thermometer; but when I show it to her, she says that figures prove nothing. She wants to be right even when she knows she’s wrong. Her main object in life is to annoy me.” He himself, while he was speaking, seemed to me a little off his balance; he went on with growing excitement: “Everything she does amiss in life she sets down as a grievance against me. All her judgments are warped. I’ll just explain to you how it is: You know our impressions of outside images come to us reversed and that there’s an apparatus in our brains which sets them right again. Well, Madame de La Pérouse has no such apparatus for setting them right. In her brain they _remain_ upside down. You can see for yourself how painful it is.” It was certainly a great relief to him to explain himself and I took care not to interrupt him. He went on: “Madame de La Pérouse has always eaten much too much. Well, now she makes out that it’s I who eat too much. If she sees me presently with a bit of chocolate (it’s my chief nourishment) she’ll be certain to mutter, ‘Munching again!...’ She spies on me. She accuses me of getting up in the night to eat on the sly, because she once surprised me making myself a cup of chocolate in the kitchen.... What am I to do? When I see her opposite me at table, falling ravenously upon her food, as she does, it takes away my appetite entirely. Then she declares I’m pretending to be fastidious just to torment her.” He paused, and then in a sort of lyrical outburst: “Her reproaches amaze me!... For instance, when she is suffering from her sciatica, I condole with her. Then she stops me, shrugs her shoulders and says: ‘Don’t pretend you have a heart.’ Everything I do or say is in order to give her pain.” We had seated ourselves, but all the time he was speaking, he kept getting up and sitting down again, in a state of morbid restlessness.