"But, excuse me—it seems to me that you are hardly in ball dress—and the ladies are rather particular about that."
"If you'd invited me, I'd have come in full dress; you didn't invite me, so I came as a neighbor. All is for the best, as Doctor Pangloss says. Present me to your niece."
"Later; they are going to dance now; you see they are forming a quadrille. Let us go into another room."
"They are going to dance, eh? Then I'll not go, deuce take me! for I can dance, you know. I used to be one of the best of La Chaumière's pupils, and she was a pupil of Chicard. People fought for places to see me dance the Tulipe Orageuse. I propose to show you that I haven't forgotten it all."
Thereupon the ex-beau, leaving Monsieur Blanquette, walked toward the benches on which the ladies were seated, and offered his gloved hand to one of the younger ones, saying:
"Will you do me the honor, lovely coryphée, to accept my hand for this contra-dance?"
Cherami thereupon addressed the same request to one after another, varying his phrase slightly; but there was no variation in the replies; it was always the same formula:
"I am engaged."
For no young woman, married or unmarried, cared to dance with a person so red of face, so shabbily dressed, smelling so strongly of rum, and with his right hand always behind his back.