People used to visit the Malhoures a great deal. Their house was in the first place a centre of reunion for the great professor's former pupils who were separated by their modes of life; intrigue also went on behind the doors with important personages of the Academy of Sciences; finally people were amused by the youthfulness of the three young ladies and the good nature of their father, whose appearance--a legendary one in the École--was in itself an element of mirth. He was huge and short, with eyes hidden behind blue spectacles, a beard collar of greenish-white, clothes of extraordinary cut, and a continual nodding of the head. Though he presented this figure, it was pretended that the old man had once been a lady's man, a gay dog, as the students used to say facetiously to one another. At twenty-two, he had discovered a theorem, which bore his name, and since then he had multiplied treatises after treatises. When, wearied by fourteen hours of work, he went out in the evening, he used to follow the young workwomen in the Quartier de l'Observatoire, where he then lived. He used to heap up engaging offers to entice them, but he was so ugly--so ugly--that they laughed impudently in his face. The savant used to look round him to make sure he was not heard, and then murmur as a supreme argument: "I am Malhoure, the inventor of the theorem!" After his marriage he had grown somewhat religious, but he had remained very cheerful, especially when he had discovered some particularly elegant formula during the day. Such was doubtless the case that evening, for he was standing on the threshold receiving the guests with his most cordial smile, although he did not recognise one person out of ten; he had no memory for faces. By his side, and grumbling, was his intimate friend, Professor Moreau, a calculator long and lean, and as great a pessimist as Malhoure was an optimist. Just as Madame Chazel reached the landing, and while she was leaving her furs in the care of the servant, the two professors were speaking of a lady who had just passed, wearing a dress as outrageously low as she herself was faded, and old Malhoure was saying to his friend: "Well, geometry does not grow old. The square of the hypotenuse is always young." "For my own part," replied Moreau, "I can see whether a woman is hump-backed or blind of an eye, whether she walks straight or is lame. But what difference there is between ugliness and beauty I have never been able to conceive." The piano was playing a quadrille, the din of the dance filled the rooms, and Malhoure clasped both of Chazel's hands, taking him for some one else, and calling him "My dear, my very dear Arthur." Helen was looking, with strange feeling of envy, at the professors, whose conversation she had just overheard. They at least would never know that continuous, settled torture which brings with it incapacity for a thought foreign to itself, for study, for reading, for conversation!