“Fifteen sous a-day!” ejaculated M. David’s voice to the other side of Ned.
“It was like the bursting of a shell,” said Reveillon, in a sort of rapturous retrospection. “We were looking—our vivats still echoed in the air; the smiles with which they had parted from us were yet reflected on our faces; there came a spout of flame, very mean and small against the blue, and little black things shot from it and fled earthwards. It was fearful—heart-thrilling, that sound of a man falling through two-thirds of a mile. And the finish—the settling vibration! Mon Dieu! but I have never since missed an ascent.”
“Fifteen sous a-day!” exclaimed David.
But Ned instinctively withdrew himself from a touch that had grown unpleasant to him.
“The cloven hoof!” he thought. “And is to be without bowels the secret of every plutocrat’s success?”
“Fifteen sous a-day!” repeated David monotonously.
Reveillon came back to earth a moment, and made him an ironic bow.
“Certainly,” he said. “It is the wages of a good journeyman, and more than those of many an artist who disdains to be a time-server.”
The disintegrated crowd, swarming abroad like a disturbed knot of newly hatched spiders, surrounded and absorbed him. M. le peintre du Roi summoned Ned’s attention, peering over his shoulder.
“It is an insolent parvenu,” he said; “a Philistine double damned for grinding the faces of the poor. Permit me the privilege to look, monsieur. An artist is known by his performance. There is a severity here that entirely commends itself to me.”