smoking-room, filled his pockets with cigars, and invited me to do likewise. That Loyer is a bad man, harsh to the unfortunate, to the weak, and to the humble. And Garain, don’t you think his mind is disgusting? Do you remember the first time I dined at your house and we talked of Napoleon? Your hair, twisted above your neck, and shot through by a diamond arrow, was adorable. Paul Vence said subtle things. Garain did not understand. You asked for my opinion.” “It was to make you shine. I was already conceited for you.” “Oh, I never could say a single phrase before people who are so serious. Yet I had a great desire to say that Napoleon III pleased me more than Napoleon I; that I thought him more touching; but perhaps that idea would have produced a bad effect. But I am not so destitute of talent as to care about politics.” He looked around the room, and at the furniture with familiar tenderness. He opened a drawer: “Here are mamma’s eye-glasses. How she searched for these eye-glasses! Now I will show you my room. If it is not in order you must excuse Madame Fusellier, who is trained to respect my disorder.” The curtains at the windows were down. He did not lift them. After an hour she drew back the red satin draperies; rays of light dazzled her eyes and fell on her floating hair. She looked for a mirror and found only a looking-glass of Venice, dull in its wide ebony border. Rising on the tips of her toes to see herself in it, she said: “Is that sombre and far-away spectre I? The women who have looked at themselves in this glass can not have complimented you on it.” As she was taking pins from the table she noticed a little bronze figure which she had not yet seen. It was an old Italian work of Flemish taste: a nude woman, with short legs and heavy stomach, who apparently ran with an arm extended. She thought the figure had a droll air. She asked what she was doing. “She is doing what Madame Mundanity does on the portal of the cathedral at Basle.” But Therese, who had been at Basle, did not know Madame Mundanity. She looked at the figure again, did not understand, and asked: “Is it something very bad? How can a thing shown on the portal of a church be so difficult to tell here?” Suddenly an anxiety came to her: “What will Monsieur and Madame Fusellier think of me?” Then, discovering on the wall a medallion wherein Dechartre had modelled the profile of a girl, amusing and vicious: “What is that?” “That is Clara, a newspaper girl. She brought the Figaro to me every morning. She had dimples in her cheeks, nests for kisses. One day I said to her: ‘I will make your portrait.’ She came, one summer morning, with earrings and rings which she had bought at the Neuilly fair. I never saw her again. I do not know what has become of her. She was too instinctive to become a fashionable demi-mondaine. Shall I take it out?” “No; it looks very well in that corner. I am not jealous of Clara.”