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A fine rain was now falling, and the cold feel of it on his hands calmed him. He thought of his wife who was staying in a country house near Macon, where her friend Mme de Chezelles had been ailing a good deal since the autumn. The carriages in the roadway were rolling through a stream of mud. The country, he thought, must be detestable in such vile weather.
Georges, who could not leave without his mother, had stationed himself at the door, where he gave the exact address. "Third floor, door on your left." Yet before going out Fauchery gave a final glance. Vandeuvres had again resumed his position among the ladies and was laughing with Leonide de Chezelles.
The two lamps on the chimney piece, which had shades of rose-colored lace, cast a feeble light over them while on scattered pieces of furniture there burned but three other lamps, so that the great drawing room remained in soft shadow. Steiner was getting bored. He was describing to Fauchery an escapade of that little Mme de Chezelles, whom he simply referred to as Leonide.
Her daughter Estelle, a slight, insignificant-looking girl of sixteen, the thankless period of life, quitted the large footstool on which she was sitting and silently came and propped up one of the logs which had rolled from its place. But Mme de Chezelles, a convent friend of Sabine's and her junior by five years, exclaimed: "Dear me, I would gladly be possessed of a drawing room such as yours!
There remained Leonide de Chezelles and Steiner, an ugly little knot against which Mme Hugon's elderly and amiable serenity stood out in strange contrast. And Fauchery, having sketched out his article, named this last group "Countess Sabine's little clique." "On another occasion," continued Steiner in still lower tones, "Leonide got her tenor down to Montauban.
"Yes, some very fine fetes are promised," said Mme du Joncquoy. The banker Steiner, not long since introduced into this circle by Leonide de Chezelles, who was acquainted with the whole of Parisian society, was sitting chatting on a sofa between two of the windows.
From the moment his mother had turned him loose in the room he had been hovering in the wake of Mme de Chezelles, the only woman present who struck him as being the thing. But after all is said and done, Nana licked her to fits! "Yesterday evening," Mme Hugon was saying, "Georges took me to the play. Yes, we went to the Varietes, where I certainly had not set foot for the last ten years.
She's done up the entire house." But the ladies grew silent, for Mme de Chezelles was entering the room, followed by a band of young men. She was going into ecstasies and marking her approval with a succession of little exclamations. "Oh, it's delicious, exquisite! What taste!" And she shouted back to her followers: "Didn't I say so?
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