Tresten advised him to spend an hour with the baroness.

‘I can’t; she makes me feel too old,’ said Alvan.  ’She talks.  She listens, but I don’t want to speak.  Dead silence!—­let it be a dash of the pen till you return.  As for these good people hurrying to their traffic, and tourists and loungers, they have a trick for killing time without hurting him.  I wish I had.  I try to smother a minute, and up the old fellow jumps quivering all over and threatening me body and soul.  They don’t appear as if they had news on their faces this morning.  I’ve not seen a newspaper and won’t look at one.  Here we separate.  Be formal in mentioning me to her but be particularly civil.  I know you have the right tone:  she’s a critical puss.  Days like these are the days for her to be out.  There goes a parasol like one I ’ve seen her carry.  Stay—­ no!  Don’t forget my instructions.  Paris for a time.  It may be the Pyrenees.  Paris on our way back.  She would like the Pyrenees.  It’s not too late for society at Luchon and Cauterets.  She likes mountains, she mounts well:  in any case, plenty of mules can be had.  Paris to wind up with.  Paris will be fuller about the beginning of October.’

He had quitted Tresten, and was talking to himself, cheating’ himself, not discordantly at all.  The poet of the company within him claimed the word and was allowed by the others to dilate on Clotilde’s likings, and the honeymoon or post-honeymoon amusements to be provided for her in Pyrenean valleys, and Parisian theatres and salons.  She was friande of chocolates, bon-bons:  she enjoyed fine pastry, had a real relish of good wine.  She should have the best of everything; he knew the spots of the very best that Paris could supply, in confiseurs and restaurants, and in millinery likewise.  A lively recollection of the prattle of Parisian ladies furnished names and addresses likely to prove invaluable to Clotilde.  He knew actors and actresses, and managers of theatres, and mighty men in letters.  She should have the cream of Paris.  Does she hint at rewarding him for his trouble?  The thought of her indebted lips, half closed, asking him how to repay him, sprang his heart to his throat.

CHAPTER XVI

Then he found himself saying:  ‘At the age I touch!’ . . .

At the age of forty, men that love love rootedly.  If the love is plucked from them, the life goes with it.

He backed on his physical pride, a stout bulwark.  His forty years—­the forty, the fifty, the sixty of Alvan, matched the twenties and thirties of other men.