"Would you pour out the tea?" the Countess said, suddenly, touching Saint Mars' fingers, who was beginning an amorous conversation in a low voice, with her fan. And while he slowly filled the little china cup, he continued: "Are the Montefiores as good as the lying newspapers make out?"
Then Tom Sheffield and the others all joined in.
They had never seen anything like it, they declared; it was most exciting, and made one shiver unpleasantly, like when the espada comes to close quarters with the infuriated brute at a bull fight.
Countess Regina listened in silence, and nibbled the petals of a tea rose.
"How I should like to see them!" giddy Madame de Rhouel exclaimed.
"Unfortunately, cousin," the Countess said, in the solemn tones of a preacher, "a respectable woman dare not let herself be seen in improper places."
They all agreeing with her, nevertheless, Madame de Villégby was present at the Montefiores' performance two days later, dressed all in black, and wearing a thick veil, at the back of a stage box.
And that woman was as cold as a steel buckler, and had married as soon as she left the convent in which she had been to school, without any affection or even liking for her husband, whom the most skeptical respected as a saint, and who had a look of virgin purity on her calm face as she went down the steps of the Madeleine on Sundays, after high mass.
Countess Regina stretched herself nervously, grew pale, and trembled like the strings of a violin, on which an artist had been playing some wild symphony, and inhaled the nasty smell of the sawdust, as if it had been the perfume of a bouquet of unknown flowers, and clenched her hands, and gazed eagerly at the two mountebanks, whom the public applauded rapturously at every feat. And contemptuously and haughtily she compared those two men, who were as vigorous as wild animals that have grown up in the open air, with the rickety limbs, which look so awkward in the dress of an English groom, that had tried to inflame her heart.