“I say ... do you often go about picking up schoolboys?” Then as I was stammering out some kind of a confused answer, he opened the satchel he was carrying under his arm to slip his purchase into it. It held his lesson books and one or two copy-books, all covered with blue paper. I took one out; it was a history note-book. Its small owner had written his name on it in large letters. My heart gave a jump as I recognized that it was my nephew’s: GEORGE MOLINIER. (Bernard’s heart gave a jump too as he read these lines and the whole story began to interest him prodigiously.) It will be difficult to get it accepted that the character who stands for me in _The Counterfeiters_ can have kept on good terms with his sister and yet not have known her children. I have always had the greatest difficulty in tampering with real facts. Even to alter the colour of a person’s hair seems to me a piece of cheating which must lessen the verisimilitude of the truth. Everything hangs together and I always feel such a subtle interdependence between all the facts life offers me, that it seems to me impossible to change a single one without modifying the whole. And yet I can hardly explain that this boy’s mother is only my half-sister by a first marriage of my father’s; that I never saw her during the whole time my parents were alive; that we were brought into contact by business relating to the property they left.... All this is indispensable, however, and I don’t see what else I can invent in order to avoid being indiscreet. I knew that my half-sister had three sons; I had met the eldest--a medical student--but I had caught only a sight even of him, as he has been obliged to interrupt his studies on account of a threatening of tuberculosis and has gone to some place in the South for treatment. The two others were never there when I went to see Pauline; the one who was now before me was certainly the youngest. I showed no trace of astonishment, but, taking an abrupt leave of young George after learning that he was going home to lunch, I jumped into a taxi in order to get to Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs before him. I expected that at this hour of the morning Pauline would keep me to lunch--which was exactly what happened; I had brought away a copy of my book from Perrin’s, and made up my mind to present it to her as an excuse for my unexpected visit. It was the first time I had taken a meal at Pauline’s. I was wrong to fight shy of my brother-in-law. I can hardly believe that he is a very remarkable jurist, but when we are together he has the sense to keep off his shop as much as I off mine, so that we get on very well. Naturally when I got there that morning I did not breathe a word of my recent meeting: “It will give me an opportunity, I hope, of making my nephews’ acquaintance,” I said, when Pauline asked me to stay to lunch. “For, you know, there are two of them I have never met.”