WHAT A BRAVE THING he is about to do! M. Pujol swells; feels briefly, blissfully, free from disgrace. But as he looks up at her, it occurs to him that the girl does not lend herself very well to being saved: she is too odd, too refractory; she looks unsettling as she stands there, paddle suspended, and even when Marguerite's ivory fan cracks against the side of her head, the girl's face remains furrowed in thought. Though dressed as she is, ridiculously, in a froth of petticoats and bows, there is nothing she resembles more than a fading scholar, lost within the thickets of his own peculiar field. The ivory fan makes a sharp and terrible noise, yet she looks as though she is deciphering a moldy text, or perhaps creeping her way through a mathematical proof.