<link href="ddd-ebooks-master-styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/> <meta content="urn:uuid:cc390fec-3837-440e-9096-f46f67b42ca7" name="Adept.expected.resource"/> </head> <body> <h1><em>XXVIII</em></h1> <div style="margin: 1.5em;"/> <p>DOCTOR Well, how’s our scratch?</p> <p>JEAN Scratch indeed! Funny, aren’t you. It still hurts.</p> <p>DOCTOR Compared with Jacques and Surget, you’ve no cause for complaint.</p> <p>JEAN Always the optimist.</p> <p>DOCTOR And if, like our poor friend Hubert …</p> <p>JEAN Hubert! He bores us to death with his Icarus. The idea! – suspecting us! Hiring a detective to follow us! Challenging us to a duel! In which we get wounded, what’s more. There’s no justice!</p> <p>DOCTOR None of this is so very terrible when you compare it with losing a character. Just think – what if that had happened to you?</p> <p>JEAN There are as good characters in the pool as ever came out of it! In any case, I have a file full of characters, hundreds of them, on the strength of which I can go on producing works based entirely on adultery and on ultra modern fin-de-siècle sentiments which may well soon be out of date, but which at the moment are extremely lucrative.</p> <p>DOCTOR What are you complaining about, then?</p> <p>JEAN My physical scratch.</p> </body> </html>