to have been able to come--" She did not give him time to finish, rose
slowly, unwound herself like a long and slender snake from the pleated
folds of her tight dress, and said, without looking at him, "Oh, I
knew--I knew!" then changed her place and took no more notice of him. He
attempted to approach Hemerlingue, but the good man seemed absorbed in
his conversation with Maurice Trott. Then he went to sit down near Mme.
Jenkins, whose isolation seemed like his own. But, even while talking
to the poor woman, as languid as he was preoccupied, he was watching
the baroness doing the honours of this drawing-room, so comfortable when
compared with his own gilded halls.

It was time to leave. Mme. Hemerlingue went to the door with some of
the ladies, presented her forehead to the old princess, bent under the
benediction of the Armenian bishop, nodded with a smile to the young men
with the canes, found for each the fitting adieu with perfect ease; and
the wretched man could not prevent himself from comparing this Eastern
slave, so Parisian, so distinguished in the best society of the world,
with the other, the European brutalized by the East, stupefied with
Turkish tobacco, and swollen with idleness. His ambitions, his pride as
a husband, were extinguished and humiliated in this marriage of which
he saw the danger and the emptiness--a final cruelty of fate taking from
him even the refuge of personal happiness from all his public disasters.

Little by little the room was emptied. The Levantines disappeared one
after another, leaving each time an immense void in their place. Mme.
Jenkins was gone, and only two or three ladies remained whom Jansoulet
did not know, and behind whom the mistress of the house seemed to
shelter herself from him. But Hemerlingue was free, and the Nabob
rejoined him at the moment when he was furtively escaping to his offices
on the same floor opposite his rooms. Jansoulet went out with him,
forgetting in his trouble to salute the baroness, and once on the
antechamber staircase, Hemerlingue, cold and reserved while he was under
his wife's eye, expanded a little.

"It is very annoying," said he in a low voice, as if he feared to be
overheard, "that Mme. Jansoulet has not been willing to come."

Jansoulet answered him by a movement of despair and savage helplessness.

"Annoying, annoying," repeated the other in a whisper, and feeling for
his key in his pocket.

"Come, old fellow," said the Nabob, taki