"That depends on what kind they are."
"Perhaps you have company, and I disturb you?"
"Not at all. I am alone. Come in."
I passed through a very small room, in which I did not see a single piece of furniture, into a large bedroom with an iron bed, a desk, chairs, two trunks, and a small book-case. Clothes and toilet articles were scattered about on all the furniture and in every corner. If picturesque disorder is the result of an artistic temperament, it is impossible to be more artistic than Balloquet, who offered me a chair, saying, as he removed the dressing gown in which he was wrapped:
"I'll go back to bed, with your permission?"
"Certainly; but you lie in bed very late; are you ill?"
"Not now; but I've had a hard time."
"You are changed, that is true. Where is your fine coloring, and the fresh complexion that procured you so many soft glances?"
"Oh! as to my fresh complexion, I have lost that entirely; but it will come back. It's infernally cold here!"
"That is true."