"We had a very pleasant journey," she said, "but after such a long absence one longs to be at home again."
Yes, the remark was a natural one. But, uttered by the lips of the slender, chilly little wife, it also signified: "My husband wished to come and see you and I could not prevent him. But don't be mistaken, I am very dissatisfied about it." At any rate, this was the involuntary construction Hautefeuille placed upon the words in his inner consciousness. Thus he was grateful to Corancez when he approached and spared him the difficulty of replying. The train started off again, leaving the road clear for the passengers, and the Southerner walked up, holding out his hand and smiling.
"How do you do, Olivier?—You don't remember me?—I am Corancez. We studied rhetoric together. If Pierre had only told me that you were in the train, we could have travelled together and had a good gossip about old times. You are looking splendidly, just as you did at twenty. Will you present me to Madame du Prat?"
"As a matter of fact, I did not recognize him," Olivier said a few minutes later, when they were in the carriage that was rolling toward the Hôtel des Palmes. "And yet he has not changed. He is the type of the Southerner, all familiarity that is intolerable when it is real and is ignoble when it is affected. Among all the detestable things in our country—and there is a good assortment — the most detestable is the 'old schoolfellow.' Because he has been a convict with you in one of those prisons called French colleges, he calls you by your Christian name, he addresses you as though you were his dearest friend. Do you see Corancez often?"
"He seems to think a great deal of you, Monsieur' Hautefeuille," said the young wife. "He embraced you the instant he was on the platform."
"He is rather demonstrative," replied Pierre, "but he is really a very amiable fellow, and has been very useful to me."
"That surprises me," said Olivier. "But how is it you never spoke to me of him in your letters? I should have been more communicative."
This little conversation was also unimportant. But it was sufficient to establish that feeling of awkwardness that is often sufficient to destroy the joy felt in the most dearly desired meeting. Hautefeuille divined there was a little reproach in the remark made by his friend about his letters, and he felt again the sensation, of hostility in Madame du Prat's observation. He became silent. The carriage was ascending the network of roads that he had traversed with Corancez upon the morning of their visit to the Jenny, and the white silhouette of the Villa Helmholtz stood out upon the left beyond the silvery foliage of the olive trees. His mistress's image reappeared in the mind of the young man with the most vivid intensity. He could not help making a comparison between his dear beloved Ely and his wife's friend. The little Frenchwoman seated by his side, a little constrained and stiff in spite of her elegant correctness, suddenly appeared to him so poor, so characterless, such a nullity, so uninteresting beside the supple, voluptuous image of the foreigner.
Berthe du Prat was the embodiment of the quiet and somewhat negative distinction that stamps the educated Parisienne (for the species exists). Her travelling costume was the work of a famous costumier, but she had been so careful to shun the merest approach to eccentricity that it was completely impersonal. She was certainly pretty with the fragile, delicate prettiness of a Dresden china figure. But her visage was so well under control, her lips so close pressed, her eyes so devoid of expression, that her charming physiognomy did not provoke the least desire to know what sort of a soul it hid. It was so apparent that it would only be made up of accepted ideas, of conventional sentiments, of perfectly irreproachable desires. This is the sort of woman that men who have seen much life ordinarily seek for wives. After having corrupted his imagination in too many cases of irregularity, Olivier had naturally married the child whose beauty flattered his pride and whose irreproachable conduct was a guarantee against any cause for jealousy.
It was not less natural that Pierre, educated in the midst of conventional ideas, and who had suffered from the prejudices of his family, should remark in the composition of the young woman her very evident poverty of human sympathy, as well as all that was mean and mediocre, particularly by comparison.