to him. "What's the use of getting excited, and over
what, I ask you? Come now, you are not a woman."
"That's true, too, but you provoked me with this Juliette. . . . How does this Juliette concern you anyway?"
"Was it not natural on my part to want to know the name of the person to whom you had introduced me? . . . And then, frankly, pending the invention of some other machine than woman for breeding children . . ."
"Pending that . . . I am a brute," interrupted Lirat, who again seated himself before his easel, a little ashamed of himself, and in a quiet voice asked:
"Dear little Mintie, would you mind sitting for me a little. That won't bore you, will it? For only ten minutes."
Joseph Lirat was forty-two years old. I made his acquaintance casually one evening; I no longer remember where it was, and though he had the reputation of being a misanthrope, unsociable and spiteful, I instantly took a fancy to him. Is it not painful to think that our deepest friendships, which ought to be the result of a long process of selection, that the gravest events in our life which should be brought about by a logical chain of causes, are for the most part, the instant result of chance? . . . You are at home in your study, tranquilly absorbed in a book. Outside the sky is grey, the air is cold: it is raining, the wind is blowing, the street is gloomy and dirty, therefore you have every good reason in the world not to stir from your chair. . . . Yet you go out, driven by weariness, by idleness, by something you yourself don't know by nothing, . . . and then at the end of a hundred steps, you meet the man, the woman, the carriage, the stone, the orange peel, the mud puddle which upsets your whole existence from top to bottom.
