"Yet you are not alleging that the whole virtue of Paris has found asylum in our district!... I shall never be tired of repeating it to you: on the other side of the water are to be found many people that belong to decent society, and even to the aristocracy, people who have left the Faubourg to go and live in the new sections, the Champs Elysées, for instance.... Well! those people--you are not going to tell me that they...." Cyprien sneered with commiseration and took up the gauntlet. "Ha! ha! I am not going to tell you?... Of course, I am going to tell you!..." And tell he did. He jumped from digression to digression, slashing right and left, forward and back, twirling his ideas about and knocking heads down everywhere in the craze of a wholesale assault. One after the other, the degenerated aristocracy, the Jews, the grafters and the priests fell under his blows. He reinforced himself with quotations from his favorite masters and these excited him as a war cry. M. Raindal kept his peace for a moment, but feeling that his silence was perhaps even more exasperating to his adversary than mild retorts, he turned on the tap of conciliatory generalities. They oozed from his lips in amorphous, unfinished sentences, in small, intermittent streams, similar to the colorless and limpid dribble that runs along the chin of a baby; or else they suddenly dried up under the wind of invective. "The plague of democracies.... A necessary evil.... This M. Rochefort is truly clever.... Experience teaches us.... M. Drumont is not lacking in spirit.... One of the vices of the plutocratic régime.... It is not a new thing to see financiers and revenue farmers.... I do not deny that M. Schleifmann is a very distinguished thinker.... We have come to a turning point of history...." Thérèse came in and interrupted him, for her Uncle Cyprien instinctively lowered his voice when he saw her. The shy evasions of M. Raindal increased his assurance; but he dreaded sarcastic remarks or the sharp retorts of "Mademoiselle his nephew." "Well, what is happening?" Thérèse asked sweetly.... "Uncle, I bet you are teasing my poor father again? "Hum! Not at all!" Uncle Cyprien replied shame-facedly.... "Not at all, we were merely talking.... You understand, one warms up, one gets excited...." Thérèse pouted derisively. "Yes, yes, I know, you warm up, you get excited.... I heard you from my room...." She turned to M. Raindal. "Come on, father, it is eleven.... Mother is ready.... Go and dress...." Alone with her uncle, she walked to the fireplace to straighten in front of the mirror her hair which she had disarranged here and there when inserting her flowers. She wore white carnations--in memory of _Albârt_. Their spreading whiteness enlivened her face. Her neck seemed by reflection less sallow and more delicate in the pink muslin frame of her corsage.