which one fails to catch. They were faces well known to all the regular guests. One of them, however, was being pointed out, a newcomer with distended nostrils and a smug upper lip, who looked like a cleric; he was entering upon his duties there for the first time, and everyone gazed with interest at this newly elected candidate. But presently, perhaps to drive Robert away so that she might be alone with Aimé, Rachel began to make eyes at a young student, who was feeding with another man at a neighbouring table. “Zézette, let me beg you not to look at that young man like that,” said Saint-Loup, on whose face the hesitating flush of a moment ago had been gathered now into a scarlet tide which dilated and darkened his swollen features, “if you must make a scene here, I shall simply finish eating by myself and join you at the theatre afterwards.” At this point a messenger came up to tell Aimé that he was wanted to speak to a gentleman in a carriage outside. Saint-Loup, ever uneasy, and afraid now that it might be some message of an amorous nature that was to be conveyed to his mistress, looked out of the window and saw there, sitting up in his brougham, his hands tightly buttoned in white gloves with black seams, a flower in his buttonhole, M. de Charlus. “There; you see!” he said to me in a low voice, “my family hunt me down even here. Will you, please—I can’t very well do it myself, but you can, as you know the head waiter so well and he’s certain to give us away—ask him not to go to the carriage. He can always send some other waiter who doesn’t know me. I know my uncle; if they tell him that I’m not known here, he’ll never come inside to look for me, he loathes this sort of place. Really, it’s pretty disgusting that an old petticoat-chaser like him, who is still at it, too, should be perpetually lecturing me and coming to spy on me!” Aimé on receiving my instructions sent one of his underlings to explain that he was busy and could not come out at the moment, and (should the gentleman ask for the Marquis de Saint-Loup) that they did not know any such person. But Saint-Loup’s mistress, who had failed to catch our whispered conversation and thought that it was still about the young man at whom Robert had been finding fault with her for making eyes, broke out in a torrent of rage. “Oh, indeed! So it’s the young man over there, now, is it? Thank you for telling me; it’s a real pleasure to have this sort of thing with one’s meals! Don’t listen to him, please; he’s rather cross to-day, and, you know,” she went on, turning to me, “he just says it because he thinks it smart, that it’s the gentlemanly thing to appear jealous always.” And she began with feet and fingers to shew signs of nervous irritation. “But, Zézette, it is I who find it unpleasant. You are making us all ridiculous before that gentleman, who will begin to imagine you’re making overtures to him, and an impossible bounder he looks, too.”