Charrigaud neither ate or drank, and said nothing. Although he was scarcely in the conversation, he nevertheless felt its enormous and forbidding stupidity like a weight upon his skull. Impatient, feverish, very pale, he watched the service, tried to catch favorable or ironical impressions of the faces of his guests, and mechanically, with movements more and more accelerated, and in spite of the warnings of his wife, rolled big pellets of bread-crumb between his fingers. When a question was put to him, he answered in a bewildered, distracted, far-away voice:
"Certainly ... certainly ... certainly."
Opposite him, very stiff in her green gown, upon which spangles of green steel glittered with a phosphorescent brilliancy, and wearing an aigrette of red feathers in her hair, Mme. Charrigaud bent to right and to left, and smiled, without ever a word,—a smile so eternally motionless that it seemed painted on her lips.
"What a goose!" said Charrigaud to himself; "what a stupid and ridiculous woman! And what a carnival costume! To-morrow, because of her, we shall be the laughing-stock of Parisian society."
And on her side Mme. Charrigaud, beneath the fixity of her smile, was thinking:
"What an idiot this Victor is! And what a bad appearance he makes! To-morrow we shall catch it on account of his pellets."
The topic of correctness in society being exhausted, there followed an embarrassing lull in the conversation, which Kimberly broke by telling of his last trip to London.
"Yes," said he, "I spent in London an intoxicating week; and, ladies, I witnessed a unique thing. I attended a ritual dinner which the great poet, John-Giotto Farfadetti, gave to some friends to celebrate his betrothal to the wife of his dear Frederic-Ossian Pinggleton."
"How exquisite that must have been!" minced the Countess Fergus.
"You cannot imagine," answered Kimberly, whose look and gestures, and even the orchid that adorned the button-hole of his coat, expressed the most ardent ecstasy.