She turned her back on him and went her way. His gross sense of humour required no cultivation. It was a poisonous weed. And what did he mean by dragging in Bigourdin? She would never speak to Martin again, after his disgraceful innuendo. It took the flavour from the sympathetic relations that had been set up between her host and herself during the past week. A twinge of conscience exacerbated her anger against Martin. She certainly had encouraged Bigourdin to fuller professions of friendship than is usual between landlord and guest. The fresh flowers he had laid by her plate at every meal she wore in her dress. Only the night before she had ever so delicately hinted that Martin was capable of visiting the Café de l’Univers without a bear-leader, and the huge and poetical man had sat with her in the moonlight and in terms of picturesque philosophy had exposed to her the barren loneliness of his soul. She had enjoyed the evening prodigiously, and was looking forward to other evenings equally exhilarating. Now Martin had spoiled it all. She called Martin names that would have shocked Mrs. Hastings and caused her father to mention her specially during family prayers. Then she defended herself proudly. Who was there to talk to in that Nowhere of a place? The conversation of Félise stimulated as much as that of a ten-year-old child. Martin she had sucked dry as a bone during their seven weeks companionship. He of course could hob-nob with men at the café. He also had picked up a curious assortment of acquaintance, male and female in the town, and had acquired a knack of conversing with them. A day or two ago she had come upon him in one of the rock dwellings discussing politics with a desperate villain who worked in the freestone quarries, while the frowsy mistress of the house lavished on him smiles and the horrible grey wine of the country which he drank out of a bowl. She, Corinna, had no café; nor could she find anything in common with desperadoes of quarrymen and their frowsy wives; to enter their houses savoured of district visiting, a philanthropic practice which she abhorred with all the abhorrence of a parson’s rebellious daughter. Where was she to look for satisfying human intercourse? She knew enough of the French middle-class manners and customs to be aware that she might live in Brantôme a thousand years before one lady would call on her—a mere question of social code as to which she had no cause for resentment. But she craved the stimulus, the give-and-take of talk, such as had been her daily food in Paris for the last three years. Huge, not at all commonplace, but somewhat of an enigma, Bigourdin lumbered on to her horizon. His first-hand knowledge of men and things was confined to Brantôme and Lyons. But with that knowledge he had pierced deep and wide. He had read little but astonishingly. He had a grasp of European, even of English internal affairs that disconcerted Corinna, who airily