tice by dint of
gesticulations, the other turned his back to bow very low to a party of
three--the father short and fat, with a sanguine face; the mother very
thin, of the colour of wax, and devoured by anemia; and the daughter
so physically backward at eighteen, that she retained all the lank
scragginess of childhood.

'All right!' muttered the painter. 'There he's caught now. What ugly
acquaintances the brute has! Where can he have fished up such horrors?'

Gagniere quietly replied that he knew the strangers by sight. M.
Margaillan was a great masonry contractor, already a millionaire five or
six times over, and was making his fortune out of the great public
works of Paris, running up whole boulevards on his own account. No doubt
Dubuche had become acquainted with him through one of the architects he
worked for.

However, Sandoz, compassionating the scragginess of the girl, whom he
kept watching, judged her in one sentence.

'Ah! the poor little flayed kitten. One feels sorry for her.'

'Let them alone!' exclaimed Claude, ferociously. 'They have all the
crimes of the middle classes stamped on their faces; they reek of
scrofula and idiocy. It serves them right. But hallo! our runaway friend
is making off with them. What grovellers architects are! Good riddance.
He'll have to look for us when he wants us!'

Dubuche, who had not seen his friends, had just offered his arm to the
mother, and was going off, explaining the pictures with gestures typical
of exaggerated politeness.

'Well, let's proceed then,' said Fagerolles; and, addressing Gagniere,
he asked, 'Do you know where they have put Claude's picture?'

'I? no, I was looking for it--I am going with you.'

He accompanied them, forgetting Irma Becot against the 'line.' It was
she who had wanted to visit the Salon on his arm, and he was so little
used to promenading a woman about, that he had constantly lost her on
the way, and was each time stupefied to find her again beside him, no
longer knowing how or why they were thus together. She ran after them,
and took his arm once more in order to follow Claude, who was already
passing into another gallery with Fagerolles and Sandoz.

Then the five roamed about in Indian file, with their noses in the
air, now separated by a sudden crush, now reunited by another, and
ever carried along by the stream. An abomination of Chaine's, a 'Christ
pardoning the Woman taken in Adultery,' made them pause; it was a group
of dr