Olivier, who _had_ thought he would never blush again, blushed. He could not but feel the irony of these words, notwithstanding the cordiality of their tone. As for Bernard, he was still wearing the same suit he had on the evening of his flight. He had not been expecting to see Olivier. With his arm in his, he drew him along, questioning as they went. He felt a sudden shock of joy at seeing him. If at first he smiled a little at the refinement of his dress, it was with no malice; his heart was good; he was without bitterness. “You’ll lunch with me, won’t you? Yes; I have got to go back at one thirty for Latin. This morning it was French.” “Pleased?” “_I_ am, yes; but I don’t know whether the examiners will be. We had to discuss these lines from La Fontaine: ‘_Papillon du Parnasse, et semblable aux abeilles_ _A qui le bon Platon compare nos merveilles,_ _Je suis chose légère et vole à tout sujet,_ _Je vais de fleur en fleur et d’objet en objet._’ How would you have done it?” Olivier could not resist a desire to shine: “I should have said that La Fontaine, in painting himself, had painted the portrait of the artist--of the man who consents to take merely the outside of things, their surface, their bloom. Then I should have contrasted with that the portrait of the scholar, the seeker, the man who goes deep into things, and I should have shown that while the scholar seeks, the artist finds; that the man who goes deep, gets stuck, the man who gets stuck, gets sunk--up to his eyes and over them; that the truth is the appearance of things, that their secret is their form and that what is deepest in man is his skin.” This last phrase Olivier had stolen from Passavant, who himself had gathered it from the lips of Paul-Ambroise, as he was discoursing one day in a lady’s drawing-room. Everything that was not printed was fish for Passavant’s net; what he called “ideas in the air”--that is to say--other people’s. Something or other in Olivier’s tone showed Bernard that this phrase was not his own. Olivier’s voice did not seem at home in it. Bernard was on the point of asking: “Whose?” But besides not wishing to hurt his friend, he was afraid of hearing Passavant’s name, which up till now had not been pronounced. Bernard contented himself with giving his friend a searching look; and Olivier, for the second time, blushed.