Farther along, soft voices were murmuring:

"Yes, father, do, do go speak to him. See how lonely he looks, poor
man!"

"But, children, I do not know him."

"Never mind. Just a bow. Something to show him that he is not utterly
deserted."

Thereupon the little old gentleman, very red in the face and wearing
a white tie, stepped quickly in front of the Nabob, and ceremoniously
raised his hat to him with great respect. With what gratitude, what
a smile of eager good-will was that solitary greeting returned, that
greeting from a man whom Jansoulet did not know, whom he had never seen,
and who had yet exerted a weighty influence upon his destiny; for, but
for the _pere_ Joyeuse, the chairman of the board of the Territorial
would probably have shared the fate of the Marquis de Bois l'Hery. Thus
it is that in the tangle of modern society, that great web of interests,
ambitions, services accepted and rendered, all the various worlds are
connected, united beneath the surface, from the highest existences
to the most humble; this it is that explains the variegation, the
complexity of this study of manners, the collection of the scattered
threads of which the writer who is careful of truth is bound to make the
background of his story.

In ten minutes the Nabob had been subjected to every manifestation
of the terrible ostracism of that Paris world to which he had neither
relationship nor serious ties, and whose contempt isolated him more
surely than a visiting monarch is isolated by respect--the averted look,
the apparently aimless step aside, the hat suddenly put on and pulled
down over the eyes. Overcome by embarrassment and shame, he stumbled.
Some one said quite loudly, "He is drunk," and all that the poor man
could manage to do was to return and shut himself up in the salon at the
back of his box. Ordinarily, this little retreat was crowded during
the intervals between the acts by stock-brokers and journalists. They
laughed and smoked and made a great noise; the manager would come to
greet his sleeping partner. But on this evening there was nobody. And
the absence of Cardailhac, with his keen nose for success, signified
fully to Jansoulet the measure of his disgrace.

"What have I done? Why will Paris have no more of me?"

Thus he questioned himself amid a solitude that was accentuated by the
noises around, the abrupt turning of keys in the doors of the boxes, the
thousand exclamations of an amused crowd. Then sudden