Someone who had slipped into the room, and who had been standing unobserved behind the heavy curtains of the door listening to the lies in the air, slipped out now like a hound freed from the leash, and embraced the Princesse de Cammora, nearly dislocating her neck, and brushing the bloom off her right cheek. It was Toto.
Never was created a more debonair or devil-may-care-looking person than Toto; the name fitted him like a glove, at least now, as he stood helping himself to sweets from the table and laughing at his mother. He looked about eighteen; his real age, however, was twenty-two, and he possessed that brightness of eye and vivacity of manner which sometimes indicates genius, and sometimes excellent health, combined with a highly strung nervous temperament. Affecting Longchamps and art, the society of pugilists and men of letters, shining here as a flâneur, there as the patron of little poets, and lately—somewhat in secret—as a painter of pictures painted all by himself, he presented a queer variety of that always amusing insect, the “child of the age.”
“Where the devil can Toto have come from?” asked Otto Struve, the art critic, one day, tilting his hat back in momentary astonishment. “His father, on his own showing, was a miser; his mother never laughed. They marry, and live for ten years unproductive as a pair of icebergs, and then produce Toto, who only stops smiling when he laughs or yawns, and spending money when he sleeps; whose head produces the most extraordinary ideas in Paris; whom God constructed with one eye on the gingerbread fair, and whom the devil made a prince of—a prince of twenty, with the ideas of ten and the vices of sixty!”
“I am a changeling,” had replied Toto, bonneting Otto Struve’s hat in such a manner that it had to be cut off with scissors.
Now he saluted everyone at once—Helen Powers, and his mother, and the old Princesse de Harnac. The Empire decadents came out of their corner like lizards towards sunshine, and he promptly invited them to stay to dinner, knowing that his mother hated them, and that he would be dining out himself.
“I have been to a cock-fight at Chantilly,” he explained, glancing down at the suit of tweed in which he was dressed. “The police broke it up, and we had to run; but they wired, and the police stopped me at the Nord. They let me go when I gave my address; then I took a cab from the Nord, and coming downhill we ran over a dog—nothing but accidents.”
The old Marquis de Nani lifted up his hands in pretended horror to please his hostess, and lowered them again and took a pinch of snuff when that lady frowned slightly.
“I do not see any particular harm in cock-fighting,” said Toto’s mother, appealing to the company generally, and Helen Powers in particular. “I know it sounds cruel, but, then, they say the cocks enjoy it.”
“That must be so,” said the Marquis, replacing his snuff-box in his pocket, “or else they would not fight.”
“But——” said Miss Powers, and stopped. Her eyes had met Toto’s eyes. He was standing almost behind his mother and making grimaces, as if to say, “For goodness’ sake don’t begin an argument, or we shall never get away.” “But,” said Miss Powers, shamelessly turning the conversation in the wished-for direction, “you promised me, M. le Prince, to show me those pictures on which you were engaged.”