A circular smile, a vigorous handshake for the host, and Jenkins took his seat opposite him, beside Monpavon and in front of a plate which a servant brought in hot haste, exactly as at a table-d'hote. Amid those preoccupied, feverish faces, that one presented a striking contrast with its good-humor, its expansive smile, and the loquacious, flattering affability which makes the Irish to a certain extent the Gascons of Great Britain. And what a robust appetite! with what energy, what liberty of conscience, he managed his double row of white teeth, talking all the while. "Well, Jansoulet, did you read it?" "Read what, pray?" "What! don't you know? Haven't you read what the _Messager_ said about you this morning?" Beneath the thick tan on his cheeks the Nabob blushed like a child, and his eyes sparkled with delight as he replied: "Do you mean it? The _Messager_ said something about me?" "Two whole columns. How is it that Moessard didn't show it to you?" "Oh!" said Moessard modestly, "it wasn't worth the trouble." He was a journalist in a small way, fair-haired and spruce, a pretty fellow enough, but with a face marked by the faded look peculiar to waiters at all-night restaurants, actors and prostitutes, made up of conventional grimaces and the sallow reflection of the gas. He was reputed to be the plighted lover of an exiled queen of very easy virtue. That rumor was whispered about wherever he went, and gave him an envied and most contemptible prominence in his circle. Jansoulet insisted upon reading the article, being impatient to hear what was said of him. Unfortunately Jenkins had left his copy at the duke's. "Let some one go at once and get me a _Messager_," said the Nabob to the servant behind his chair. Moessard interposed: "That isn't necessary; I must have the thing about me." And with the free and easy manner of the tap-room habitue, of the reporter who scrawls his notes as he sits in front of his mug of beer, the journalist produced a pocketbook stuffed with memoranda, stamped papers, newspaper clippings, notes on glossy paper with crests--which he scattered over the table, pushing his plate away, to look for the proof of his article. "Here it is." He passed it to Jansoulet; but Jenkins cried out: "No, no, read it aloud." As the whole party echoed the demand, Moessard took back his proof and began to read aloud the WORK OF BETHLEHEM AND M. BERNARD JANSOULET, a long deliverance in favor of artificial nursing, written from Jenkins' notes, which were recognizable by certain grandiloquent phrases of the sort that the Irishman affected: "the long martyrology of infancy--the venality of the breast--the goat, the beneficent nurse,"--and concluding, after a turgid description of the magnificent establishment at Nanterre, with a eulogy of Jenkins and the glorification of Jansoulet: "O Bernard Jansoulet, benefactor of infancy!"