ok hands with two gentlemen who had arrived
before him--Monsieur Firmin and Monsieur Laroche-Mathieu, deputies, and
anonymous editors of the _Vie Francaise_. Monsieur Laroche-Mathieu had a
special authority at the paper, due to a great influence he enjoyed in
the Chamber. No one doubted his being a minister some day. Then came the
Forestiers; the wife in pink, and looking charming. Duroy was stupefied
to see her on terms of intimacy with the two deputies. She chatted in
low tones beside the fireplace, for more than five minutes, with
Monsieur Laroche-Mathieu. Charles seemed worn out. He had grown much
thinner during the past month, and coughed incessantly as he repeated:
"I must make up my mind to finish the winter in the south." Norbert de
Varenne and Jacques Rival made their appearance together. Then a door
having opened at the further end of the room, Monsieur Walter came in
with two tall young girls, of from sixteen to eighteen, one ugly and the
other pretty.

Duroy knew that the governor was the father of a family; but he was
struck with astonishment. He had never thought of his daughters, save as
one thinks of distant countries which one will never see. And then he
had fancied them quite young, and here they were grown-up women. They
held out their hands to him after being introduced, and then went and
sat down at a little table, without doubt reserved to them, at which
they began to turn over a number of reels of silk in a work-basket. They
were still awaiting someone, and all were silent with that sense of
oppression, preceding dinners, between people who do not find themselves
in the same mental atmosphere after the different occupations of the
day.

Duroy having, for want of occupation, raised his eyes towards the wall,
Monsieur Walter called to him from a distance, with an evident wish to
show off his property: "Are you looking at my pictures? I will show them
to you," and he took a lamp, so that the details might be distinguished.

"Here we have landscapes," said he.

In the center of the wall was a large canvas by Guillemet, a bit of the
Normandy coast under a lowering sky. Below it a wood, by Harpignies, and
a plain in Algeria, by Guillemet, with a camel on the horizon, a tall
camel with long legs, like some strange monument. Monsieur Walter passed
on to the next wall, and announced in a grave tone, like a master of the
ceremonies: "High Art." There were four: "A Hospital Visit," by Gervex;
"A Harveste