“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, where have you been straying to?  Your elbow is covered with cobwebs and plaster.”

“My elbow,” he muttered, slightly disturbed.  “Yes indeed, it’s true.  A speck or two, I must have come in for them on my way down from my office.”

Several people were taking their departure.  It was close on midnight.  Two footmen were noiselessly removing the empty cups and the plates with cakes.  In front of the hearth the ladies had re-formed and, at the same time, narrowed their circle and were chatting more carelessly than before in the languid atmosphere peculiar to the close of a party.  The very room was going to sleep, and slowly creeping shadows were cast by its walls.  It was then Fauchery spoke of departure.  Yet he once more forgot his intention at sight of the Countess Sabine.  She was resting from her cares as hostess, and as she sat in her wonted seat, silent, her eyes fixed on a log which was turning into embers, her face appeared so white and so impassable that doubt again possessed him.  In the glow of the fire the small black hairs on the mole at the corner of her lip became white.  It was Nana’s very mole, down to the color of the hair.  He could not refrain from whispering something about it in Vandeuvres’s ear.  Gad, it was true; the other had never noticed it before.  And both men continued this comparison of Nana and the countess.  They discovered a vague resemblance about the chin and the mouth, but the eyes were not at all alike.  Then, too, Nana had a good-natured expression, while with the countess it was hard to decide—­she might have been a cat, sleeping with claws withdrawn and paws stirred by a scarce-perceptible nervous quiver.

“All the same, one could have her,” declared Fauchery.

Vandeuvres stripped her at a glance.

“Yes, one could, all the same,” he said.  “But I think nothing of the thighs, you know.  Will you bet she has no thighs?”