haps, to take his pencil-case, which had been left on the table.
He took it—shut the pencil in and out, broke its point against the wood, re-cut and pocketed it, and . . . . . walked promptly up to me. The girls and teachers, gathered round the other table, were talking pretty freely: they always talked at meals; and, from the constant habit of speaking fast and loud at such times, did not now subdue their voices much.
M. Paul came and stood behind me. He asked at what I was working; and I said I was making a watchguard.
He asked, "For whom?" And I answered, "For a gentleman—one of my friends."
M. Paul stooped down and proceeded—as novel-writers say, and as was literally true in his case—to "hiss" into my ear some poignant words.
He said that, of all the women he knew, I was the one who could make herself the most consummately unpleasant: I was she with whom it was least possible to live on friendly terms. I had a "caractére intraitable" and perverse to a miracle. How I managed it, or what possessed me, he, for
