and juvenile
irony. He resumed after a minute's pause:

"But how did the gods escape from that awkward situation?"

"By turning the two runners into stone."

"Upon my word," said he, "that is a solution which I do not at all
accept. I defy the gods ever to petrify my heart."

A fiery gleam shot for a moment from his eyes, extinguished immediately
by the thought that people were observing them.

In effect, people were observing them intently, but no one with so
much curiosity as Jenkins, who wandered round them a little way off,
impatient and fidgety, as though he were annoyed with Felicia for taking
private possession of the important personage of the assembly. The young
girl laughingly called the duke's attention to it.

"People will say that I am monopolizing you."

She pointed out to him Monpavon waiting, standing near the Nabob who,
from afar, was gazing at his excellency with the beseeching, submissive
eyes of a big, good-tempered mastiff. The Minister of State then
remembered the object which had brought him. He bowed to the young girl
and returned to Monpavon, who was able at last to present to him "his
honourable friend, M. Bernard Jansoulet." His excellency bowed slightly,
the _parvenu_ humbled himself lower than the earth, then they chatted
for a moment.

A group curious to observe. Jansoulet, tall, strong, with an air of the
people about him, a sunburned skin, his broad back arched as though made
round for ever by the low bowings of Oriental courtiery, his big, short
hands splitting his light gloves, his excessive gestures, his southern
exuberance chopping up his words like a puncher. The other, a high-bred
gentleman, a man of the world, elegance itself, easy in his least
gestures, though these, however, were extremely rare, carelessly letting
fall unfinished sentences, relieving by a half smile the gravity of his
face, concealing beneath an imperturbable politeness the deep contempt
which he had for man and woman; and it was in that contempt that his
strength lay. In an American drawing-room the antithesis would have been
less violent. The Nabob's millions would have re-established the balance
and even made the scale lean to his side. But Paris does not yet place
money above every other force, and to realize this, it was sufficient
to observe the great contractor wriggling amiably before the great
gentleman and casting under his feet, like the courtier's cloak of
ermine, the dense vanity of a newly