"I find you in a nice predicament," he replied. "I hear casually yesterday that you are turned out of your hotel, treating the matter as a joke, and relating it as an amusing story to absolute strangers--turned out--how can I say it, Ermengarde? for silly--for compromising intimacy--ugh!--with the hotel-keeper's daughter's fiancé----" "Really? Much obliged for your kind interest in my affairs. Slater's detectives? Most ingenious. And, of course, you believed all you were told by your Sherlock Holmes's and Paul Prys." "And," he continued, ignoring these sarcasms, "to-day I come personally to see for myself----" "In the disguise of a Polish Anarchist----" "And find you with that accursed young French idiot at your feet----" "Young French idiots fall at people's feet on very small provocation." "Making violent love to you--apparently." "Ah! It's just as well you put in that 'apparently'," she commented quite tranquilly, though all the time she was saying to herself, "Bluff, Ermengarde, bluff! it's your only chance." "You were crying----" "Probably; I've had a good deal to cry about of late----" She looked down as she spoke to arrange the set of her blouse, and gave her drapery a few careful little pats. "--Agitated. Perhaps you will offer some explanation of this?" "Perhaps. In the meantime, perhaps you will offer some explanation of your conduct." She looked up, quite satisfied now with the set of the blouse belt. "My dear child, this folly must end; this is a serious matter and not an amateur farce. You have landed yourself in a most compromising situation, made yourself the cause, the patent, acknowledged, loudly proclaimed cause, of an engagement being broken off; and you simply laugh at the whole thing." "And if I have, as you say, brought myself into such a situation, pray, whose fault was it?" "Whose should it be but your own, your own folly and wilfulness and insane disregard of common proprieties and decent conventions." She had always understood that the Socratic method of conducting an argument consisted in asking, and never answering, perpetual questions, and being under the impression that Socrates was a person of quite remarkable sagacity, resolved to employ it. As on this wise. "Who refused to take me abroad for my health when I needed it, and then followed me secretly in disguise to spy out and magnify every mistake I might make? Who employed spies about me to report and distort every incident of my life here? Who had grown so cold and cruel and faithless to me at home that it was no home any more, and I felt I could endure it no longer? Who was too busy and too poor to send his wife to the South after illness, when he had just made a great success and was planning a tour of his own to the very place he actually followed her to, disguised as a spy? Who kept all his good fortune from his wife's knowledge?" A faint sob, disguised as a cough, interrupted this interrogatory.