He pointed to a tiny canvas before which he had stood absorbed, an absolutely childish picture, such as an urchin of four might have painted; a little cottage at the edge of a little road, with a little tree beside it, the whole out of drawing, and girt round with black lines. Not even a corkscrew imitation of smoke issuing from the roof was forgotten. Claude made a nervous gesture, while Fagerolles repeated phlegmatically: ‘Very delicate, very delicate. But your picture, Gagnière, where is it?’ ‘My picture, it is there.’ In fact, the picture he had sent happened to be very near the little masterpiece. It was a landscape of a pearly grey, a bit of the Seine banks, painted carefully, pretty in tone, though somewhat heavy, and perfectly ponderated without a sign of any revolutionary splash. ‘To think that they were idiotic enough to refuse that!’ said Claude, who had approached with an air of interest. But why, I ask you, why?’ ‘Because it’s realistic,’ said Fagerolles, in so sharp a voice that one could not tell whether he was gibing at the jury or at the picture. Meanwhile, Irma, of whom no one took any notice, was looking fixedly at Claude with the unconscious smile which the savage loutishness of that big fellow always brought to her lips. To think that he had not even cared to see her again. She found him so much altered since the last time she had seen him, so funny, and not at all prepossessing, with his hair standing on end, and his face wan and sallow, as if he had had a severe fever. Pained that he did not seem to notice her, she wanted to attract his attention, and touched his arm with a familiar gesture. ‘I say, isn’t that one of your friends over there, looking for you?’ It was Dubuche, whom she knew from having seen him on one occasion at the Café Baudequin. He was, with difficulty, elbowing his way through the crowd, and staring vaguely at the sea of heads around him. But all at once, when Claude was trying to attract his notice by dint of gesticulations, the other turned his back to bow very low to a party of three--the father short and fat, with a sanguine face; the mother very thin, of the colour of wax, and devoured by anemia; and the daughter so physically backward at eighteen, that she retained all the lank scragginess of childhood. ‘All right!’ muttered the painter. ‘There he’s caught now. What ugly acquaintances the brute has! Where can he have fished up such horrors?’ Gagnière quietly replied that he knew the strangers by sight. M. Margaillan was a great masonry contractor, already a millionaire five or six times over, and was making his fortune out of the great public works of Paris, running up whole boulevards on his own account. No doubt Dubuche had become acquainted with him through one of the architects he worked for. However, Sandoz, compassionating the scragginess of the girl, whom he kept watching, judged her in one sentence. ‘Ah! the poor little flayed kitten. One feels sorry for her.’