of letters.

They spoke of one good lady, well known in Parisian society, who had, it
was said, just married her lover to her daughter, the better to keep him.
Christophe squirmed in his chair, and tactlessly made a face of disgust.
Kohn saw it, and nudged his neighbor and pointed out that the subject
seemed to excite the German--that no doubt he was longing to know the lady.
Christophe blushed, muttered angrily, and finally said hotly that such
women ought to be whipped. His proposition was received with a shout of
Homeric laughter: and Sylvain Kohn cooingly protested that no man should
touch a woman, even with a flower, etc., etc. (In Paris he was the very
Knight of Love.) Christophe replied that a woman of that sort was neither
more nor less than a bitch, and that there was only one remedy for vicious
dogs: the whip. They roared at him. Christophe said that their gallantry
was hypocritical, and that those who talked most of their respect for women
were those who possessed the least of it: and he protested against these
scandalous tales. They replied that there was no scandal in it, and that it
was only natural: and they were all agreed that the heroine of the story
was not only a charming woman, but _the_ Woman, _par excellence_. The
German waxed indignant. Sylvain Kohn asked him slyly what he thought Woman
was like. Christophe felt that they were pulling his leg and laying a trap
for him: but he fell straight into it in the violent expression of his
convictions. He began to explain his ideas on love to these bantering
Parisians. He could not find his words, floundered about after them, and
finally fished up from the phrases he remembered such impossible words,
such enormities, that he had all his hearers rocking with laughter, while
all the time he was perfectly and admirably serious, never bothered about
them, and was touchingly impervious to their ridicule: for he could not
help seeing that they were making fun of him. At last he tied himself up
in a sentence, could not extricate himself, brought his fist down on the