"You are a man of discernment, Binet," said Scaramouche, the cold loathing of his voice itself an insult. "Perhaps you discern the reason?"
"It is readily discerned."
"Regale the company with it!" he begged; and waited. "What? You hesitate? Is it possible that there are limits to your shamelessness?"
Binet reared his great head. "Do you want to quarrel with me, Scaramouche?" Thunder was rumbling in his deep voice.
"Quarrel? You want to laugh. A man doesn't quarrel with creatures like you. We all know the place held in the public esteem by complacent husbands. But, in God's name, what place is there at all for complacent fathers?"
Binet heaved himself up, a great towering mass of manhood. Violently he shook off the restraining hand of Pierrot who sat on his left.
"A thousand devils!" he roared; "if you take that tone with me, I'll break every bone in your filthy body."
"If you were to lay a finger on me, Binet, you would give me the only provocation I still need to kill you." Andre-Louis was as calm as ever, and therefore the more menacing. Alarm stirred the company. He protruded from his pocket the butt of a pistol--newly purchased. "I go armed, Binet. It is only fair to give you warning. Provoke me as you have suggested, and I'll kill you with no more compunction than I should kill a slug, which after all is the thing you most resemble--a slug, Binet; a fat, slimy body; foulness without soul and without intelligence. When I come to think of it I can't suffer to sit at table with you. It turns my stomach."
He pushed away his platter and got up. "I'll go and eat at the ordinary below stairs."
Thereupon up jumped Columbine.
"And I'll come with you, Scaramouche!" cried she.
It acted like a signal. Had the thing been concerted it couldn't have fallen out more uniformly. Binet, in fact, was persuaded of a conspiracy. For in the wake of Columbine went Leandre, in the wake of Leandre, Polichinelle and then all the rest together, until Binet found himself sitting alone at the head of an empty table in an empty room--a badly shaken man whose rage could afford him no support against the dread by which he was suddenly invaded.
He sat down to think things out, and he was still at that melancholy occupation when perhaps a half-hour later his daughter entered the room, returned at last from her excursion.