When Agathe saw them in the distance, she squeezed her friend’s arm, saying:
“Look, my dear; here come all the people who speak ill of us. Really they are all so hideous that I am no longer surprised that they are spiteful!”
“Don’t seem to be looking toward them.”
“Why not, pray? Do you suppose I am going to give myself a crick in the neck because of Madame Droguet? I am very sorry that Monsieur Edmond is in Paris to-day; for he would have come with us, and that would have made all those people all the more frantic.—Ah! my dear, the doctor bows to us! Good for him! he is still polite, at all events.”
Honorine turned and bowed pleasantly to the doctor, thereby placing the former wine merchant in a painfully embarrassing position; for he too was facing the young woman and would have been glad to salute her; but Madame Droguet held his arm and glared at him fixedly and with such a determined expression that, in order to extricate himself adroitly from his predicament, Monsieur Luminot simulated five or six sneezes in quick succession; and everyone knows that in sneezing one usually makes a movement of the head which resembles a bow.
“Well! what does this mean?” demanded Madame Droguet, with an angry glance at her cavalier. “Why do you sneeze like that?”
“Why—I sneeze—Mon Dieu! because I had to sneeze. It takes you suddenly, you know; I suppose I have a cold in my head.”
“This is the first I have heard of it.”
“Or I; but you never know you have one until it appears.”
“Really, one would have thought that you were bowing to those women.”