"Why so, pray?" demanded the Duke. "Am I not to-day a poor devil with nothing in the world? Is she not of good birth? Is not her reputation spotless? I should like to know what my mother would find to say against it,--she who already calls the young lady her daughter, and who wishes us to respect her as if she were our own sister." "You, sir, carry your enthusiasm or your joke to great lengths," said the Marquis, stunned by what he heard. "Good," thought the Duke, "he has forgotten his brotherly _thee_ and _thou_; he calls me 'you, sir.'" And he continued to maintain with astonishing seriousness that he was quite capable of marrying Mlle de Saint-Geneix, if there were no other means of winning her. "I should prefer to run away with her," he added; "that would better accord with my usual way of doing things; but I no longer have the means with which to run away with her, and now my laundress herself would not trust herself to my hands. Besides, it is time to break with my entire past. I have said it to you, and it is done, because I have said it. Starting from to-day,--a complete reformation along the whole line. You are going to see a new man,--a man whom I myself do not know, and who indeed is going to astonish me; but that man, I feel now, is capable of all things, all, even to believe, to love, and to marry. So good evening, brother; those are my last words; if you do not repeat them to Mlle de Saint-Geneix, it is because you wish to do nothing to aid me in my conversion." The Duke withdrew, leaving his brother stupefied,--divided between the necessity of believing him sincere in his momentary passion and the indignity of being solicited as an accomplice in a flagrant libertinism. "But no," he said to himself, going to his own apartments; "that was all merely his gayety, his trifling, his folly,--or it was still the wine. Nevertheless, this morning in the grove he interrogated me about Caroline with a surprising insistence, and that, too, almost in the midst of my confidences concerning my past, which he received with genuine emotion, with tears in his eyes. What kind of a man then is this brother of mine? Not twelve hours ago, he thought of killing himself. He hated me, he detested himself. Then I believed I had won his heart. He sobbed in my arms. All day long it has been the extreme of impulse and devotion, winning tenderness and goodwill; and to-night I no longer know what it is. Has his reason received some shock in the uncurbed life which he has hitherto led, or did he indeed make sport of me all the fore part of the day? Am I the dupe of my need to love? Shall I have cause for bitter repentance, or have I in fact taken upon myself the task of caring for a diseased brain?"