“What else in the world can I do? You know very well what happened to me. My poor old father was just able to send me to Cambridge because I had a good scholarship. When he died there was nothing to supplement the scholarship which wasn’t enough to keep me at the University. I had to go down. My mother had nothing but my father’s life insurance money—a thousand pounds—and twenty pounds a year from the Freemasons. When she wrote to her relations about her distress, what do you think my damned set of Swiss uncles and aunts and cousins sent her? Two hundred francs! Eight pounds! And they’re all rolling in money got out of the English. I had to find work at once to support us both. My only equipment was a knowledge of French. I got a post at Margett’s through a scholastic agency. I thought it a miracle. When the letter came accepting my application I didn’t sleep all night. I remained there till a week or so ago, working twelve hours a day all the year round. I don’t say I had classes for twelve hours,” he admitted, conscientiously, “but when you see about a couple of hundred pupils a day and they all do written work which needs correcting, you’ll find you have as much work in class as out of class. Last night I dreamed I was confronted with a pile of exercise books eight feet high.” “It’s a dog’s life,” Corinna repeated. “It is,” said Martin. “_Mais que veux-tu, ma pauvre Corinne._ I detest it as much as one can detest anything. If even I was a successful teacher—_passe encore_. But I doubt whether I have taught anybody even the _régime du participe passé_ save as a mathematical formula. It’s heart-rending. It has turned me into a brainless, soulless, heartless, bloodless machine.” For a moment or two the glamour of the Parisian meal faded away. He beheld himself—as he had wofully done in intervals between the raptures of the past few days—an anxious and despairing young man: terribly anxious to obtain another abhorred teachership, yet desperate at the prospect of lifelong, ineffectual drudgery. Corinna, her elbows on the table, poising in her hand a teaspoonful of tepid strawberry ice, regarded him earnestly. “I wish I were a man,” she declared. “What would you do?” She swallowed the morsel of ice and dropped her spoon with a clatter. “I would take life by the throat and choke something big out of it,” she cried dramatically. “Probably an ocean of tears or a Sahara of despair,” said a voice from the door.