e asks, 'Do you love me?' and the other replies, 'Yes.'"

Madame de Marelle, who had just tossed a fresh glass of champagne off at
a draught, said gayly, as she put down her glass: "For my part, I am not
so Platonic."

And all began to smile with kindling eyes at these words.

Forestier, stretched out in his seat on the divan, opened his arms,
rested them on the cushions, and said in a serious tone: "This frankness
does you honor, and proves that you are a practical woman. But may one
ask you what is the opinion of Monsieur de Marelle?"

She shrugged her shoulders slightly, with infinite and prolonged
disdain; and then in a decided tone remarked: "Monsieur de Marelle has
no opinions on this point. He only has--abstentions."

And the conversation, descending from the elevated theories, concerning
love, strayed into the flowery garden of polished blackguardism. It was
the moment of clever double meanings; veils raised by words, as
petticoats are lifted by the wind; tricks of language; clever disguised
audacities; sentences which reveal nude images in covered phrases; which
cause the vision of all that may not be said to flit rapidly before the
eye and the mind, and allow the well-bred people the enjoyment of a
kind of subtle and mysterious love, a species of impure mental contact,
due to the simultaneous evocation of secret, shameful, and longed-for
pleasures. The roast, consisting of partridges flanked by quails, had
been served; then a dish of green peas, and then a terrine of foie gras,
accompanied by a curly-leaved salad, filling a salad bowl as though with
green foam. They had partaken of all these things without tasting them,
without knowing, solely taken up by what they were talking of, plunged
as it were in a bath of love.

The two ladies were now going it strongly in their remarks. Madame de
Marelle, with a native audacity which resembled a direct provocation,
and Madame Forestier with a charming reserve, a modesty in her tone,
voice, smile, and bearing that underlined while seeming to soften the
bold remarks falling from her lips. Forestier, leaning quite back on the
cushions, laughed, drank and ate without leaving off, and sometimes
threw in a word so risque or so crude that the ladies, somewhat shocked
by its appearance, and for appearance sake, put on a little air of
embarrassment that lasted two or three seconds. When he had given vent
to something a little too coarse, he added: "You are going ahead nic