Larive? I'm surprised at you."

"So am I. I often think about it. Good-by. I must be off."

I caught him by the hand which he held out to me.

"Larive, tell me where you have met Mademoiselle Charnot?"

"Oh, come!--I see it's serious. My dear fellow, I am so sorry I did not
tell you she was perfection. If I had only known!"

"That's not what I asked you. Where have you seen her?"

"In society, of course. Where do you expect me to see young girls except
in society? My dear Fabien!"

He went off laughing. When he was about ten yards off he turned, and
making a speaking-trumpet of his hands, he shouted through them:

"She's perfection!"

Larive is decidedly an ass. His jokes strike you as funny at first; but
there's nothing in him, he's a mere hawker of stale puns; there's nothing
but selfishness under his jesting exterior. I have no belief in him. Yet
he is an old school friend; the only one of my twenty-eight classmates
whose acquaintance I have kept up. Four are dead, twenty-three others are
scattered about in obscure country places; lost for want of news, as they
say at the private inquiry offices. Larive makes up the twenty-eight. I
used to admire him, when we were low in the school, because of his long
trousers, his lofty contempt of discipline, and his precocious intimacy
with tobacco. I preferred him to the good, well-behaved boys. Whenever we
had leave out I used to buy gum-arabic at the druggist's in La Chatre,
and break it up with a small hammer at the far end of my room, away from
prying eyes. I used there to distribute it into three bags ticketed
respectively: "large pieces," "middle-sized pieces," "small pieces." When
I returned to school with the three bags in my pocket, I would draw out
one or the other to offer them to my friends, according to the importance
of the occasion, or the degrees of friendship. Larive always had the big
bits, and plenty of them. Yet he was none the more grateful to me, and
even did not mind chaffing me about these petty attentions by which he
was the gainer. He used to make fun of everything, and I used to look up
to him. He still makes fun of everything; but for me the age of gumarabic
is past and my faith in Larive is gone.

If he believes that he will disparage this charming girl in my eyes by
telling me that she is a bad dancer, he is wrong. Of great importance it
is to have a wife who dances well! She does not dance in her own house,
nor with her husband from the w