Amelie and Fifine went back to the drawing-room, taking the word back with them as food for laughter.  Lucien pleaded a defective memory and excused himself.  When he reappeared, nobody took the slightest notice of him; every one was chatting or busy at the card-tables; the poet’s aureole had been plucked away, the landowners had no use for him, the more pretentious sort looked upon him as an enemy to their ignorance, while the women were jealous of Mme. de Bargeton, the Beatrice of this modern Dante, to use the Vicar-General’s phrase, and looked at him with cold, scornful eyes.

“So this is society!” Lucien said to himself as he went down to L’Houmeau by the steps of Beaulieu; for there are times when we choose to take the longest way, that the physical exercise of walking may promote the flow of ideas.

So far from being disheartened, the fury of repulsed ambition gave Lucien new strength.  Like all those whose instincts bring them to a higher social sphere which they reach before they can hold their own in it, Lucien vowed to make any sacrifice to the end that he might remain on that higher social level.  One by one he drew out the poisoned shafts on his way home, talking aloud to himself, scoffing at the fools with whom he had to do, inventing neat answers to their idiotic questions, desperately vexed that the witty responses occurred to him so late in the day.  By the time that he reached the Bordeaux road, between the river and the foot of the hill, he thought that he could see Eve and David sitting on a baulk of timber by the river in the moonlight, and went down the footpath towards them.

While Lucien was hastening to the torture in Mme. de Bargeton’s rooms, his sister had changed her dress for a gown of pink cambric covered with narrow stripes, a straw hat, and a little silk shawl.  The simple costume seemed like a rich toilette on Eve, for she was one of those women whose great nature lends stateliness to the least personal detail; and David felt prodigiously shy of her now that she had changed her working dress.  He had made up his mind that he would speak of himself; but now as he gave his arm to this beautiful girl, and they walked through L’Houmeau together, he could find nothing to say to her.  Love delights in such reverent awe as redeemed souls know on beholding the glory of God.  So, in silence, the two lovers went across the Bridge of Saint Anne, and followed the left bank of the Charente.  Eve felt embarrassed by the pause, and stopped to look along the river; a joyous shaft of sunset had turned the water between the bridge and the new powder mills into a sheet of gold.

“What a beautiful evening it is!” she said, for the sake of saying something; “the air is warm and fresh, and full of the scent of flowers, and there is a wonderful sky.”

“Everything speaks to our heart,” said David, trying to proceed to love by way of analogy.  “Those who love find infinite delight in discovering the poetry of their own inmost souls in every chance effect of the landscape, in the thin, clear air, in the scent of the earth.  Nature speaks for them.”