where his horses ran. Then as though he had been inwardly following up quite a laborious train of thought during his remarks, he broke in with the question:
“And the marquis, by the by? Are we not to see him?”
“Oh, certainly you will! My father made me a formal promise that he would come,” replied the countess. “But I'm beginning to be anxious. His duties will have kept him.”
Vandeuvres smiled a discreet smile. He, too, seemed to have his doubts as to the exact nature of the Marquis de Chouard's duties. Indeed, he had been thinking of a pretty woman whom the marquis occasionally took into the country with him. Perhaps they could get her too.
In the meantime Fauchery decided that the moment had come in which to risk giving Count Muff his invitation. The evening, in fact, was drawing to a close.
“Are you serious?” asked Vandeuvres, who thought a joke was intended.
“Extremely serious. If I don't execute my commission she'll tear my eyes out. It's a case of landing her fish, you know.”
“Well then, I'll help you, dear boy.”
Eleven o'clock struck. Assisted by her daughter, the countess was pouring out the tea, and as hardly any guests save intimate friends had come, the cups and the platefuls of little cakes were being circulated without ceremony. Even the ladies did not leave their armchairs in front of the fire and sat sipping their tea and nibbling cakes which they held between their finger tips. From music the talk had declined to purveyors. Boissier was the only person for sweetmeats and Catherine for ices. Mme. Chantereau, however, was all for Latinville. Speech grew more and more indolent, and a sense of lassitude was lulling the room to sleep. Steiner had once more set himself secretly to undermine the deputy, whom he held in a state of blockade in the corner of a settee. M. Venot, whose teeth must have been ruined by sweet things, was eating little dry cakes, one after the other, with a small nibbling sound suggestive of a mouse, while the chief clerk, his nose in a teacup, seemed never to be going to finish its contents. As to the countess, she went in a leisurely way from one guest to another, never pressing them, indeed, only pausing a second or two before the gentlemen whom she viewed with an air of dumb interrogation before she smiled and passed on. The great fire had flushed all her face, and she looked as if she were the sister of her daughter, who appeared so withered and ungainly at her side. When she drew near Fauchery, who was chatting with her husband and Vandeuvres, she noticed that they grew suddenly silent; accordingly she did not stop but handed the cup of tea she was offering to Georges Hugon beyond them.
“It's a lady who desires your company at supper,” the journalist gaily continued, addressing Count Muffat.
The last-named, whose face had worn its gray look all the evening, seemed very much surprised. What lady was it?
“Oh, Nana!” said Vandeuvres, by way of forcing the invitation.
The count became more grave than before. His eyelids trembled just perceptibly, while a look of discomfort, such as headache produces, hovered for a moment athwart his forehead.
“But I'm not acquainted with that lady,” he murmured.
“Come, come, you went to her house,” remarked Vandeuvres.
“What d'you say? I went to her house? Oh yes, the other day, in behalf of the Benevolent Organization. I had forgotten about it. But, no matter, I am not acquainted with her, and I cannot accept.”
He had adopted an icy expression in order to make them understand that this jest did not appear to him to be in good taste. A man of his position did not sit down at tables of such women as that. Vandeuvres protested: it was to be a supper party of dramatic and artistic people, and talent excused everything. But without listening further to the arguments urged by Fauchery, who spoke of a dinner where the Prince of Scots, the son of a queen, had sat down beside an ex-music-hall singer, the count only emphasized his refusal. In so doing, he allowed himself, despite his great politeness, to be guilty of an irritated gesture.
Georges and La Faloise, standing in front of each other drinking their tea, had overheard the two or three phrases exchanged in their immediate neighborhood.
“Jove, it's at Nana's then,” murmured La Faloise. “I might have expected as much!”
Georges said nothing, but he was all aflame. His fair hair was in disorder; his blue eyes shone like tapers, so fiercely had the vice, which for some days past had surrounded him, inflamed and stirred his blood. At last he was going to plunge into all that he had dreamed of!
“I don't know the address,” La Faloise resumed.
“She lives on a third floor in the Boulevard Haussmann, between the Rue de l'Arcade and the Rue Pesquier,” said Georges all in a breath.
And when the other looked at him in much astonishment, he added, turning very red and fit to sink into the ground with embarrassment and conceit:
“I'm of the party. She invited me this morning.”
But there was a great stir in the drawing room, and Vandeuvres and Fauchery could not continue pressing the count. The Marquis de Chouard had just come in, and everyone was anxious to greet him. He had moved painfully forward, his legs failing under him, and he now stood in the middle of the room with pallid face and eyes blinking, as though he had just come out of some dark alley and were blinded by the brightness of the lamps.
“I scarcely hoped to see you tonight, Father,” said the countess. “I should have been anxious till the morning.”
He looked at her without answering, as a man might who fails to understand. His nose, which loomed immense on his shorn face, looked like a swollen pimple, while his lower lip hung down. Seeing him such a wreck, Mme. Hugon, full of kind compassion, said pitying things to him.
“You work too hard. You ought to rest yourself. At our age we ought to leave work to the young people.”
“Work! Ah yes, to be sure, work!” he stammered at last. “Always plenty of work.”
He began to pull himself together, straightening up his bent figure and passing his hand, as was his wont, over his scant gray hair, of which a few locks strayed behind his ears.
“At what are you working as late as this?” asked Mme. du Joncquoy. “I thought you were at the financial minister's reception?”
But the countess intervened with:
“My father had to study the question of a projected law.”
“Yes, a projected law,” he said; “exactly so, a projected law. I shut myself up for that reason. It refers to work in factories, and I was anxious for a proper observance of the Lord's day of rest. It is really shameful that the government is unwilling to act with vigor in the matter. Churches are growing empty; we are running headlong to ruin.”
Vandeuvres had exchanged glances with Fauchery. They both happened to be behind the marquis, and they were scanning him suspiciously. When Vandeuvres found an opportunity to take him aside and to speak to him about the good-looking creature he was in the habit of taking down into the country, the old man affected extreme surprise. Perhaps someone had seen him with the Baroness Decker, at whose house at Viroflay he sometimes spent a day or so. Vandeuvres's sole vengeance was an abrupt question:
“Tell me,
