'He takes it so,' said the baroness, musing. 'It will be the sooner over. She never cared for him a jot. And there's the sting. He has called up the whole world in an amphitheatre to see a girl laugh him to scorn. Hard for any man to bear!--Alvan of all men! Why does he not come here? He might rage at me for a day and a night, and I would rock him to sleep in the end. However, he has done nothing?' That was the point. The baroness perceived it to be a serious point, and repeated the question sharply. 'Has he been to the house?--no?-- writing?' Tresten dropped a nod. 'Not to the girl, I suppose. To the father?' said she. 'He has written to the General.' 'You should have stopped it.' 'Tell a vedette to stop cavalry. You're not thinking of the man. He's in a white frenzy.' 'I will go to him.' 'You will do wrong. Leave him to spout the stuff and get rid of his poison. I remember a sister of poor Nuciotti's going to him after he had let his men walk into a trap--and that was through a woman: and he was quieted; and the chief overlooked it; and two days after, Nuciotti blew his brains out. He'd have been alive now if he had been left alone. Furious cursing is a natural relief to some men, like women's weeping. He has written a savage letter to her father, sending the girl to the deuce with the name she deserves, and challengeing the General.' 'That letter is despatched?' 'Rudiger has it by this time.' The baroness fixed her eyes on Tresten: she struck her lap. 'Alvan! Is it he? But the General is old, gouty, out of the lists. There can be no fighting. He apologized to you for his daughter's insolence to me. He will not fight, be sure.' 'Perhaps not,' Tresten said. 'As for the girl, Alvan has the fullest right to revile her: it cannot be too widely known. I could cry: "What wisdom there is in men when they are mad!" We must allow it to counterbalance breaches of ordinary courtesy. "With the name--she deserves," you say? He pitched the very name at her character plainly?--called her what she is?' The baroness could have borne to hear it: she had no feminine horror of the staining epithet for that sex. But a sense of the distinction between camps and courts restrained the soldier. He spoke of a discharge of cuttlefish ink at the character of the girl, and added: 'The bath's a black one for her, and they had better keep it private. Regrettable, no doubt, but it 's probably true, and he 's out of his mind. It would be dangerous to check him: he'd force his best friend to fight. Leczel is with him and gives him head. It 's about time for me to go back to him, for there may be business.' The baroness thought it improbable. She was hoping that with Alvan's eruption the drop-scene would fall.