has been the man of design and the man of action also. Don Quixote was a
fool, a dreamer, but Jean Jacques is no Don Quixote. He is a man who has
done things, but also he is a man who has been broken on the wheel of
life. He is a man whose heart-strings have been torn--"

He had worked himself up into a fit of eloquence and revolt. He was
touched by the rod of desperation, which makes the soul protest that it
is right when it knows that it is wrong.

Suddenly, breaking off his speech, he threw up his hands and made for the
door.

"I will fight it out alone!" he declared with rough emotion, and at the
door he turned towards them again. He looked at them both as though he
would dare them to contradict him. The restless fire of his eyes seemed
to dart from one to the other.

"That's the way it is," said the widow of Palass Poucette coming quickly
forward to him. "It's always the way. We must fight our battles alone,
but we don't have to bear the wounds alone. In the battle you are alone,
but the hand to heal the wounds may be another's. You are a philosopher
--well, what I speak is true, isn't it?"

Virginie had said the one thing which could have stayed the tide of Jean
Jacques' pessimism and broken his cloud of gloom. She appealed to him in
the tune of an old song. The years and the curses of years had not
dispelled the illusion that he was a philosopher. He stopped with his
hand on the door.

"That's so, without doubt that's so," he said. "You have stumbled on a