‘But remember, my dear, this sort of thing cracks your Titianesque “make-up,”’ he added.
She began to laugh, mollified at once.
Claude, basking in physical comfort, kept on sipping small glasses of cognac one after another, without noticing it. During the two hours they had been there a kind of intoxication had stolen over them, the hallucinatory intoxication produced by liqueurs and tobacco smoke. They changed the conversation; the high prices that pictures were fetching came into question. Irma, who no longer spoke, kept a bit of extinguished cigarette between her lips, and fixed her eyes on the painter. At last she abruptly began to question him about his wife.
Her questions did not appear to surprise him; his ideas were going astray: ‘She had just come from the provinces,’ he said. ‘She was in a situation with a lady, and was a very good and honest girl.’
‘Pretty?’
‘Why, yes, pretty.’
For a moment Irma relapsed into her reverie, then she said, smiling: ‘Dash it all! How lucky you are!’
Then she shook herself, and exclaimed, rising from the table: ‘Nearly three o’clock! Ah! my children, I must turn you out of the house. Yes, I have an appointment with an architect; I am going to see some ground near the Parc Monceau, you know, in the new quarter which is being built. I have scented a stroke of business in that direction.’
They had returned to the drawing-room. She stopped before a looking-glass, annoyed at seeing herself so flushed.
‘It’s about that house, isn’t it?’ asked Jory. ‘You have found the money, then?’