‘You are telling a lie,’ said she, interrupting him in a clear voice.  And to cut short his protestations—­’Fagerolles was here,’ she added, ‘so you see that you are telling a lie.’

Then, turning to Claude, ’No, it’s too disgusting.  You can’t conceive what a liar he is.  He tells lies like a woman, for the pleasure of it, for the merest trifle.  Now, the whole of his story amounts simply to this:  that he didn’t want to spend three francs to buy me that book.  Each time he was to have sent me a bouquet, he had dropped it under the wheels of a carriage, or there were no flowers to be had in all Paris.  Ah! there’s a fellow who only cares for himself, and no mistake.’

Jory, without getting in the least angry, tilted back his chair and sucked his cigar, merely saying with a sneer: 

‘Oh! if you see Fagerolles now—­’

‘Well, what of it?’ she cried, becoming furious.  ’It’s no business of yours.  I snap my fingers at your Fagerolles, do you hear?  He knows very well that people don’t quarrel with me.  We know each other; we sprouted in the same crack between the paving-stones.  Look here, whenever I like, I have only to hold up my finger, and your Fagerolles will be there on the floor, licking my feet.’

She was growing animated, and Jory thought it prudent to beat a retreat.

‘My Fagerolles,’ he muttered; ‘my Fagerolles.’

’Yes, your Fagerolles.  Do you think that I don’t see through you both?  He is always patting you on the back, as he hopes to get articles out of you, and you affect generosity and calculate the advantage you’ll derive if you write up an artist liked by the public.’

This time Jory stuttered, feeling very much annoyed on account of Claude being there.  He did not attempt to defend himself, however, preferring to turn the quarrel into a joke.  Wasn’t she amusing, eh? when she blazed up like that, with her lustrous wicked eyes, and her twitching mouth, eager to indulge in vituperation?

’But remember, my dear, this sort of thing cracks your Titianesque “make-up,"’ he added.

She began to laugh, mollified at once.

Claude, basking in physical comfort, kept on sipping small glasses of cognac one after another, without noticing it.  During the two hours they had been there a kind of intoxication had stolen over them, the hallucinatory intoxication produced by liqueurs and tobacco smoke.  They changed the conversation; the high prices that pictures were fetching came into question.  Irma, who no longer spoke, kept a bit of extinguished cigarette between her lips, and fixed her eyes on the painter.  At last she abruptly began to question him about his wife.

Her questions did not appear to surprise him; his ideas were going astray:  ‘She had just come from the provinces,’ he said.  ’She was in a situation with a lady, and was a very good and honest girl.’

‘Pretty?’