Surprised and beset in that moment of unguarded emotionalism, Fanchette had capitulated; and there was an end to her scruples as a reluctant confederate. With the sacrifice of her self-respect went her last feeling of charity towards hard-pressed virtue. She regarded that now, with the eyes of the qualified _chère-amie_, as an hypocrisy to be derided and shown up. Thenceforth she was in all things her showy tyrant’s most devoted auxiliary, to be cursed or fondled, to be used and abused, to be dragged by him by the hair of her head, should he please--and so to revile him and spit at him, and turn with raking fingers on any humane champion who should come to her aid. That is to speak conditionally of Fanchette, but not of the type to which she belonged, and to which she would sooner or later conform. Not that jimp figure of hers, in its striped sarsenet frock with the slim waist, not that demure smile and young mealy complexion, would save her presently from the fate of the termagant, swollen of feature and foul of tongue, to which she was destined. There was in her that seed of Xantippe which is wont, once quickened, to sprout and increase and burst into riotous blossom in a night. She was of the substance of the true virago--vulgar, incorruptible, animal; rending the lust she has provoked; ready to die whether to spite or to save the object of her desire; ecstatically courting her own destruction at the hands of the rage she has wantonly excited--and all to prove her utter devotion to and absorption in the one. Such was Fanchette in promise--a sufficient foil, even so undeveloped, to the nobler passion she was called upon to assist in betraying. That idyllic love should lie at the mercy of such coarse understandings! But so is it decreed in this paradoxical world of ours, where the myriad inanities sit in judgment on the sapient few, where the rabble overrules the senate, the dunce the scholar, the loud illiterate voice the cultured wit. La Coque stood for the vulgar majority in this case. His hatred of a finer spirit was simply the expression of an envious and ignoble mind. He was avid to ruin Tiretta, and indifferent as to what other fair fames he besmirched in the process. At the beginning he had had no least grounds, save his own inventive malice, for the scandal at which he had obscurely hinted. Later, when he came to learn that appearances were at least beginning to give colour to his fiction, his joy waxed great and fierce. He began then seriously to contemplate the means and methods by which he might bring this belauded cockerel to his knees. He set Fanchette to watch and to report.