"
The question was raised at home whether, all things considered, I ought
still to be sent to dine with M. Legrandin. But my grandmother refused to
believe that he could have been impolite.
"You admit yourself that he appears at church there, quite simply dressed,
and all that; he hardly looks like a man of fashion." She added that; in
any event, even if, at the worst, he had been intentionally rude, it was
far better for us to pretend that we had noticed nothing. And indeed my
father himself, though more annoyed than any of us by the attitude which
Legrandin had adopted, may still have held in reserve a final uncertainty
as to its true meaning. It was like every attitude or action which reveals
a man's deep and hidden character; they bear no relation to what he has
previously said, and we cannot confirm our suspicions by the culprit's
evidence, for he will admit nothing; we are reduced to the evidence of our
own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the face of this detached and
incoherent fragment of recollection, whether indeed our senses have not
been the victims of a hallucination; with the result that such attitudes,
and these alone are of importance in indicating character, are the most
apt to leave us in perplexity.
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