Fortinbras lit another of Martin’s Virginian cigarettes—the little tin box lay open on the table—and leaned back in his chair. “My young friends,” said he, “you have each put before me the circumstances which have made you respectively despair of finding happiness both in the immediate and the distant future. Now as Montaigne says—an author whom I would recommend to you for the edification of your happily remote middle-age, having myself found infinite consolation in his sagacity—as Montaigne says: ‘Men are tormented by the ideas they have concerning things, and not by the things themselves.’ The wise man therefore—the general term, my dear Corinna, includes women—is he who has learned to face things themselves after having dispelled the bogies of his ideas concerning them. It is on this basis that I am about to deliver the judgment for which I have duly received my fee of ten francs.” He moistened his lips with the pink syrup. For the picture you can imagine a grey old lion eating ice-cream. “You, Corinna,” he continued, “belong to the new race of women whose claims on life far exceed their justification. You have as assets youth, a modicum of beauty, a bright intelligence and a stiff little character. But, as you rightly say, you are capable of nothing in the steep range of human effort from painting a picture to washing a baby. Were you not temperamentally puritanical and intellectually obsessed by the modern notion of woman’s right to an independent existence, you would find a means of realising the above-mentioned assets, as your sex has done through the centuries. But in spite of amazonian trifling with romantic-visaged and granite-headed medical students, you cling to the irresponsibilities of a celibate career.” “If he asked me, I’d marry a Turk to-morrow,” said Corinna. “Don’t interrupt,” said Fortinbras. “You disturb the flow of my ideas. I have no doubt that, in your desperate situation, you would promise to marry a Turk; but your essential pusillanimity would make you wriggle out of it at the last moment. You’re like ‘the poor cat in the adage.’” “What cat?” asked Corinna. “The one in Macbeth, Act i, Scene 3, a play by Shakespeare. ‘Letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would,” like the poor cat i’ the adage.’ You require development, my dear Corinna, out of the cat stage. You have had your head choked with ideas about things in this soul-suffocating Paris, and the ideas are tormenting you; but you’ve never been at grips with things themselves. As for our excellent Martin, he has not even arrived at the stage of the desirous cat.” The smile that lit up his coarse, lined features, and the musical suavity of his voice divested the words of offence. Martin, with a laugh, assented to the proposition.