Is the love which he had begun to persuade himself she bore him nothing but a passing caprice after all—an amourette of an hour—to be abandoned when it has lost the zest of freshness? Irritation, wounded amour propre, fierce jealousy, all mingle together in his breast and make a formidable whole when the fear creeps on him that the woman he loves to fatuous stupidity sets so little value on his feelings that she is ready to sacrifice it to the gratification of a passing whim, the transient excitement of a new conquest.
For what else, he argues, and not without reason on his side, can prompt her to look and speak to Lord Delaval with eyes and lips that too truly simulate a love she cannot possibly feel for him, stranger as he is?
Every word, every glance she gives, tortures this impassioned, impetuous Frenchman, and he determines to dog her steps and her house to find out the mystery that drives him wild.
“When’s the new play coming out, Chavard?” Scoboloff asks, gloating, gourmet as he is, on the lusciousness of an apricot before him.
Chavard has written a play which his clique declare will take Paris by storm, and, intolerably vain of his brains, he is of their opinion.
“In about a month or two,” he answers.
“Shocking bad time for that sort of thing, isn’t it? No one will be left in Paris.”
“No one at all to speak of—only about a couple of millions!”
“Keep your smartness for your play, mon cher. Of course I meant no one in Society.”
“I don’t mind that. You swells are so phlegmatic, you see. The canaille laugh, and clap, and hoot, and shout at my work, and thoroughly appreciate my pet points, but the golden youth sleep always, snore even, through my best situations.”