“No,” she answered, over her shoulder. “I waited.”
“What for?” quoth his innocence, hopefully.
“I had to change, of course, zany,” she answered, rudely. Having dragged him, as she imagined, to the chopping-block, she could not refrain from chopping. But then he was of those who must be chopping back.
“And you left your manners upstairs with your grand-lady clothes, mademoiselle. I understand.”
A scarlet flame suffused her face. “You are very insolent,” she said, lamely.
“I’ve often been told so. But I don’t believe it.” He thrust open the door for her, and bowing with an air which imposed upon her, although it was merely copied from Fleury of the Comedie Francaise, so often visited in the Louis le Grand days, he waved her in. “After you, ma demoiselle.” For greater emphasis he deliberately broke the word into its two component parts.
“I thank you, monsieur,” she answered, frostily, as near sneering as was possible to so charming a person, and went in, nor addressed him again throughout the meal. Instead, she devoted herself with an unusual and devastating assiduity to the suspiring Leandre, that poor devil who could not successfully play the lover with her on the stage because of his longing to play it in reality.
Andre-Louis ate his herrings and black bread with a good appetite nevertheless. It was poor fare, but then poor fare was the common lot of poor people in that winter of starvation, and since he had cast in his fortunes with a company whose affairs were not flourishing, he must accept the evils of the situation philosophically.
“Have you a name?” Binet asked him once in the course of that repast and during a pause in the conversation.
“It happens that I have,” said he. “I think it is Parvissimus.”