“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.