The dinner was over. They rose from the table in religious silence, but thrilled through and through. In the salon Kimberly was closely surrounded and warmly congratulated. The looks of all the women converged radiantly upon his painted face, surrounding it with a halo of ecstasies.
"Ah! I should so like to have my portrait painted by Frederic-Ossian Pinggleton," cried Mme. de Rambure; "I would give anything to enjoy such happiness."
"Alas! Madame," answered Kimberly, "since the sorrowful and sublime event which I have related, Frederic-Ossian Pinggleton has been unwilling to paint human faces, however charming they may be; he paints only souls."
"And he is right! I should so like to be painted as a soul!"
"Of what sex?" asked Maurice Fernancourt, in a slightly sarcastic tone, visibly jealous of Kimberly's success.
The latter said, simply:
"Souls have no sex, my dear Maurice. They have...."
"Hair on their paws," said Victor Charrigaud, in a very low voice, so as to be heard only by the psychological novelist, to whom he was just then offering a cigar.
And, dragging him into the smoking-room, he whispered:
"Ah! old man! I wish I could shout the most filthy things, at the top of my voice, in the faces of all these people. I have enough of their souls, of their green and perverse loves, of their magic preserves. Yes, yes, to say the coarsest things, to besmear one's self with good black fetid mud for a quarter of an hour,—oh! how exquisite that would be, and how restful! And how it would relieve me of all these nauseating lilies that they have put into my heart! And you?"