“Just remember this, my boy,” said he to Boissaric, “you must always remain to the end at a ball. The women are prettier in their moist pallor, which does not reach the point of fatigue any more than that little white line there at the windows has reached the point of being daylight. There is a little music in the air, some dust that smells nicely, a semi-intoxication which refines a sensation and which one ought to savor as one eats a hot chicken wing washed down with champagne frappé.—There! just look at that, will you.”
Behind the big mirror without a frame the farandole was lengthening out, with all arms stretched, into a chain alternate of black and light notes softened by the disorder of the toilets and hair and the mussiness that comes from two hours’ dancing.
“Isn’t that pretty, eh?—And the bully boy at the end there, isn’t he smart!” Then he added coldly, as he put down his glass:
“All the same, he will never make a cent.”
CHAPTER X.
THE NORTH AND THE SOUTH.
There never had been any great sympathy between President Le Quesnoy and his son-in-law. The lapse of time, frequent intercourse and the bonds of relationship had not been able to narrow the gap between these two natures, or to vanquish the intimidating coolness which the Provençal felt in the presence of this big, silent man, with his pale and haughty face, from whose height a steely-gray look, which was the look of Rosalie without her tenderness and indulgence, fell upon his lively nature with freezing effect. Numa, with his mobile and floating nature, always overwhelmed by his own conversation, at one and the same time a fiery and a complicated nature, was in a state of constant revolt against the logic, the uprightness, the rigidity of his father-in-law. And while he envied him these qualities, he placed them to the credit of the coldness of nature in this man of the North, that extreme North which the President represented to him.
“Beyond him, there’s the wild polar bear—beyond that, nothing at all—the north pole and death.”
All the same he flattered the President, endeavored to cajole him with adroit, feline tricks, which were his baits to catch the Gaul. But the Gaul, subtler than he was himself, would not permit himself to be taken in, and on Sunday, in the dining-room at the Place Royale, at the moment when politics were discussed, whenever Numa, softened by the good dinner, attempted to make old Le Quesnoy believe that in reality the two were very close to an understanding, because both wanted the same thing, namely, liberty—it was a sight to see the indignant toss of the head with which the President penetrated his armor.
“Oh! Not at all, not the same by any means!”
In half-a-dozen clear-cut, hard arguments, he established the distances between them, unmasked fine phrases and showed that he was not the man to be taken in by their humbuggery. Then the lawyer got out of the affair by joking, though extremely angry at bottom and particularly on account of his wife, who looked on and listened without ever mixing herself up with political talk. But then in the evening, while going home in the carriage, he took great pains to prove to her that her father was lacking in common-sense. Ah! if it had not been for her presence, how finely he would have put the President to his trumps! In order not to irritate him, Rosalie avoided taking part with either.