Mademoiselle Jeanne had taken it differently.  With lifted chin and reddened cheek she shot this sentence at me from the edge of a lip disdainfully puckered: 

“There are such things as ‘successes of esteem,’ sir!”

Alas!  I knew that well, and I had no need of this additional lesson to teach me the rudeness of my remark, to make me feel that I was a brute, an idiot, hopelessly lost in the opinion of M. Charnot and his daughter.  It was cruel, all the same.  Nothing was left for me but to hurry my departure.  I got up to go.

“But,” said M. Charnot in the smoothest of tones, “I do not think we have yet discussed the question that brought you here.”

“I should hesitate, sir, to trespass further on your time.”

“Never mind that.  Your question concerns?”

“The costume of the Latini Juniani.”

“Difficult to answer, like most questions of dress.  Have you read the work, in seventeen volumes, by the German, Friedchenhausen?”

“No.”

“You must have read, at any rate, Smith, the Englishman, on ancient costume?”

“Nor that either.  I only know Italian.”

“Well, then, look through two or three treatises on numismatics, the ‘Thesaurus Morellianus’, or the ‘Praestantiora Numismata’, of Valliant, or Banduri, or Pembrock, or Pellerin.  You may chance upon a scent.”

“Thank you, thank you, sir!”

He saw me to the door.

As I turned to go I noticed that his daughter was standing motionless still, with the face of an angry Diana.  She held between her fingers the recovered spiral.

I found myself in the street.

I could not have been more clumsy, more ill-bred, or more unfortunate.  I had come to make an apology and had given further offence.  Just like my luck!  And the daughter, too—­I had hurt her feelings.  Still, she had stood up for me; she had said to her father, “Not every one can be in the Institute,” evidently meaning, “Why are you torturing this poor young man?  He is bashful and ill at ease.  I feel sorry for him.”  Sorry—­yes; no doubt she felt sorry for me at first.  But then I came out with that impertinence about the twenty-seven copies, and by this time she hates me beyond a doubt.  Yes, she hates me.  It is too painful to think of.

Mademoiselle Charnot will probably remain but a stranger to me, a fugitive apparition in my path of life; yet her anger lies heavy upon me, and the thought of those disdainful lips pursues me.

I had rarely been more thoroughly disgusted with myself, and with all about me.  I needed something to divert me, to distract me, to make me forget, and so I set off for home by the longest way, going down the Rue de Beaune to the Seine.