“Well, I never! What d’you take me for? A thief?” But he said it with such conviction that I almost began to doubt my own eyes. I felt that I should lose my hold over him if I went on. I took three coins out of my pocket: “All right! Go and buy it. I’ll wait for you.” Two minutes later he came back turning over the pages of the coveted work. I took it out of his hands. It was an old guide-book of the year 1871. “What’s the good of that?” I said as I handed it back to him. “It’s too old. It’s of no use.” He protested that it was--that, besides, recent guide-books were much too dear, and that for all he should do with it the maps of this one were good enough. I don’t attempt to quote his words, which would lose their savour without the extraordinarily vulgar accent with which he said them and which was all the more amusing because his sentences were not turned without a certain elegance. * * * * * This episode must be very much shortened. Precision in the reader’s imagination should be obtained not by accumulating details but by two or three touches put in exactly the right places. I expect for that matter that it would be a better plan to make the boy tell the story himself; his point of view is of more signification than mine. He is flattered and at the same time made uncomfortable by the attention I pay him. But the weight of my look makes him deviate a little from his own real direction. A personality which is over tender and still too young to be conscious of itself, takes shelter behind an attitude. Nothing is more difficult to observe than creatures in the period of formation. One ought to look at them only sideways--in profile. The youngster suddenly declared that what he liked best was geography! I suspected that an instinct for vagabonding was concealed behind this liking. “You’d like to go to those parts?” I asked. “Wouldn’t I?” he answered, shrugging his shoulders. The idea crossed my mind that he was unhappy at home. I asked him if he lived with his parents. “Yes.” Didn’t he get on with them? He protested rather lukewarmly that he did. He seemed afraid that he had given himself away by what he had just said. He added: “Why do you ask that?” “Oh, for nothing,” I answered, and then, touching the yellow ribbon in his buttonhole, “What’s that?” “It’s a ribbon. Can’t you see?” My questions evidently annoyed him. He turned towards me abruptly and almost vindictively, and in a jeering, insolent voice of which I should never have thought him capable and which absolutely turned me sick: