playground will presently have found you out and be guessing at broken
laws, though there be only broken faiths and the anguish of first steps in
perfidy.

We could not help but see, and yet for all our seeing we could not help.
The matter never took on flagrancy enough to give ever so kind an
intervener a chance to speak with effect. It was pitiful to see how little
gratification they got out of it; especially she, with that silly belief
in her ability to rekindle his spiritual energies and lift him into the
thin air of her transcendentalisms; slipping, nevertheless, bit by bit,
down the precipitous incline between her vaporous refinements and his
wallowing animalisms; too destitute of the love that loves to give, or of
courage, or of cunning, to venture into the fires of real passion, but
forever craving flattery and caresses, and for their sake forever holding
him over the burning coals of unfulfilled desire.

How could we know these things so positively?

By the entomologist; the child of science. Science yearns ever to know and
to tell. Truth for truth's sake! He had no strong _moral_ feeling against
a lie; but he had never had the slightest _use_ for a lie, and a
prevarication on his tongue would have been as strange to him as castanets
in his palms. Guile takes alertness, adroitness; and the slim pennyworth
of these that he could command he used up, no doubt, on Fontenette. I
noticed that after an hour with the Creole he always looked tortured and
exhausted. With us he was artless to the tips of his awful finger-nails.

Nor was Mrs. Fontenette a skilful dissembler; she over-concealed things so
revealingly. Then she was so helplessly enamoured and in so childish a
way. I venture one of the penalties almost any woman may have to pay for