"Do you know, Madame, that Monsieur Moscowitch has the firm intention of marrying you?" "That is quite natural." "Yes, but what do you say to it?" "It is agreeable to me." "Then," asked Entragues, "why did you not let me know?" "Ah! you would like to have the cards stacked. You do not wish to waste your time? At first, not any more than yourself, Monsieur Moscowitch never asked more than the pleasure of seeing me." "He is fascinating." "Isn't he?" returned Sixtine. "He pleases me very much and I believe that with him I shall never be bored." "Ah! you are quite perverse, but perhaps that is why I love you." "Perverse, because I do not wish to be bored!" "No, boredom is the terror of every woman, and they commit half of their crimes to escape its claws. But it is useless. Boredom, impassive, smokes his houka and maintains his slaves. I well know that passion is stronger than he is, but you are incapable of loving." "No more than another," Sixtine nonchalantly said, "and, besides all I ask is to be given the chance. I have already told you I was dough waiting for the hands of the kneader; and, after all I can not fashion myself alone. But are you coming to warble such poor ditties of jealousy, and in such a vulgar style. I believed you had more disdain and a richer vocabulary. Ah, fie! to sing such a romanza to me: 'You are incapable of loving.' Well, Monsieur, to use your language, I am at least capable of being loved. You seem to think that in love there is a category of capacities as in the time of Louis-Philippe? Would it be a special string that the cithara lacks? All the human instruments are complete and even women have spare strings, if you care to know. But skillful citharists are rare and most men only know how to direct the preliminary chord of the instrument from which they pretend to draw music. Please speak to me in the language of a logician, since that is your intellectual profession, and do not imagine that I am a boarding-school girl who will feel herself burning with love, through a very noble spirit of contradiction, at the very moment when a man presents her adroit inaninity: 'You are incapable of loving.' For you are perhaps very skillful and capable, oh! very capable of demonstrating the patent lack of logic in my feminine deductions. But, question me!" "I get," said Entragues, "much pleasure in listening to you. Your voice is sweet." "This time," he thought, "thanks to the mutual impertinences with which we are offending each other, things will end very well or very badly. She is very much unnerved and my own mental state lacks poise. We are going to reach, it is to be hoped, a surprising result." As she was silent, he resumed: "There are instruments irremediably out of tune, like those which undergo the humidity of solitude; but it is not such a great disaster--you have but to change the strings." "A turn of the peg perhaps might suffice," said Sixtine, "and first of all, a ray of sunshine."