To keep peace Robledo betook himself at ten o’clock one evening to the house of Mme. Titonius on the Avenue Kléber, having fortified himself beforehand by dining with some South American friends at one of the Boulevard restaurants.
Two servants, hired for the occasion, were helping the guests out of their overcoats. The mixture of various social groups that Elena had foreseen was noticeable even in the anteroom. Side by side with guests of distinguished appearance, accustomed to the life of the drawing-room, he noticed youths with leonine locks, whose formal evening dress was revealed only when they slid out of threadbare coats with tattered linings. He caught the contemptuous expression of the servants as they collected these coats, as well as certain fur wraps grown bald in spots, from ladies who, on emerging from these coverings, displayed the most extravagant of head dresses.
An old fellow whose whiskers, of a dirty white, and whose wide slouch hat made him look like the popular conception of a poet, threw off his summer overcoat and the woolen mufflers wound about him. Taking his pipe out of his mouth, he struck it on the heel of his shoe, and put it in his overcoat pocket.
“Take good care of that, now,” he said to the servant.
Robledo’s fur coat inspired respect in the attendants. One of them, after helping its owner out of it, kept it on his arm.
“You’ve taken a fancy to it?” the engineer inquired.
Paying no attention to his jesting tone, the fellow replied,
“I’ll just lay it aside, sir.... Because some one might make a mistake, that he might sir, going away from here....”
And with a gesture at the mound of unsightly coverings, he winked at Robledo.
The sight of the American “millionaire” in her own drawing room aroused great enthusiasm in the poetess. Scattering the guests to right and left, she plunged through the throng to meet him, grasped him by both hands, and leaning on his arm, bore him along with her, presenting him to her friends. Her eyes dwelt on him proudly as though he were the chief attraction of the occasion.