"Mille pardons, madame, but I was detained at the Crédit Lyonnais. I have just concluded a most satisfactory deal in the rubber market. So important that I was even compelled to defer the pleasure of being with you at dinner. Ma foi, you look more charming than ever, madame. I trust Renée is well. Ah, there you are, my dear." M. Payot sat down and beamed with a smile peculiar to one who has succeeded in appropriating a large sum of money belonging to his fellow-citizens. "Professor Delapine has just been telling us about a coin which was restored to its owner through the agency of spirits," said Villebois. "Agency of Spirits, did you say? More likely agency of fiddlesticks," said Payot with a grunt. "My dear sir, don't worry your head over such things. All we have to concern ourselves with is to enjoy life, and make all the money we can, after providing dots for our daughters. Believe me, all else is nonsense. I'll never believe in spirits, or in anything that we can't explain or understand. Table rapping, mesmerism, thought-reading, telepathy, spirit photographs, materialisations, are all nonsense. Fraud, my dear sir, pure fraud, and nothing else. Masks, rubber bands, double exposures, phosphorised oil, invisible wires, knees and thumbs pushing the table along, table raps arranged beforehand, confederates hidden in the cabinets playing concertinas and ringing bells. You see I know all about them. I can do it--anyone can do it. I have exposed them all. Bah! I tell you these things are impossible." The great man wiped his face with a vast display of purple silk handkerchief, and sat down fully convinced that he had uttered the last word that could be said on the matter, and that he had made a most profound and impressive speech. "He who pronounces anything to be impossible outside the field of pure mathematics is wanting in prudence," said Delapine quietly. "Whoever said such nonsense?" enquired Payot. "François Arago," replied Delapine quietly with a comical smile. Payot was silent, and a titter went round the room, as Arago was considered by common consent to have been the first scientist in France. "But still, my dear professor, these things are after all merely a huge joke," said Riche. The professor opened his blue eyes very wide and smiled. "My dear doctor, a learned pedant who laughs at the possible comes very near being an idiot. To shun a fact purposely, and turn one's back upon it with a supercilious smile, is to bankrupt truth." "Is that really your opinion?" asked Riche. "It is, but they are not my words. Besides, do you not remember that the great English naturalist Huxley wrote 'I am unaware of anything that has the right to the title of an "impossibility" except a contradiction in terms. There are impossibilities logical but not natural. Walking on the water, turning water into wine, or raising the dead are plainly not impossibilities in this sense.'"