"Evidently, for it did no more for me than to give her a chance to declare that he can't possibly be here for any good and that he belongs to a race it's my sacred duty to loathe." "I see what she means." "I don't then--where artists are concerned. I said to her: '_Ah, madame, vous savez que pour moi il n'y a que l'art!_'" "It's very exciting!" I laughed. "How could she parry that?" "'I know it, my dear child--but for _him_?' That's the way she parried it. 'Very well, for him?' I asked. 'For him there's the insolence of the victor and a secret scorn for our incurable illusions!'" "Heidenmauer has no insolence and no secret scorn." Vendemer was silent a moment. "Are you very sure of that?" "Oh, I like him! He's out of all that, and far above it. But what did Mademoiselle Paule say?" I inquired. "She said nothing--she only looked at me." "Happy man!" "Not a bit. She looked at me with strange eyes, in which I could read 'Go straight, my friend--go straight!' _Oh, les femmes, les femmes!_" "What's the matter with them now?" "They've a mortal hatred of art!" "It's a true, deep instinct," said Alfred Bonus. "But what passed further with Madame de Brindes?" I went on. "She only got into her cab, pushing her daughter first; on which I slammed the door rather hard and came up here. _Cela m'a porté sur les nerfs._" "I'm afraid I haven't soothed them," Bonus said, looking for his hat. When he had found it he added: "When the English have beaten us and pocketed our _milliards_ I'll forgive them; but not till then!" And with this he went off, made a little uncomfortable, I think, by Vendemer's sharper alternatives, while the young Frenchman called after him: "My dear fellow, at night all cats are grey!" Vendemer, when we were left alone together, mooned about the empty studio awhile and asked me three or four questions about Heidenmauer. I satisfied his curiosity as well as I could, but I demanded the reason of it. The reason he gave was that one of the young German's compositions had already begun to haunt his memory; but that was a reason which, to my sense, still left something unexplained. I didn't however challenge him, before he quitted me, further than to warn him against being deliberately perverse. "What do you mean by being deliberately perverse?" He fixed me so with his intensely living French eye that I became almost blushingly conscious of a certain insincerity and, instead of telling him what I meant, tried to get off with the deplorable remark that the prejudices of Mesdames de Brindes were after all respectable. "That's exactly what makes them so odious!" cried Vendemer.