Meanwhile, Irma, of whom no one took any notice, was looking fixedly at Claude with the unconscious smile which the savage loutishness of that big fellow always brought to her lips.  To think that he had not even cared to see her again.  She found him so much altered since the last time she had seen him, so funny, and not at all prepossessing, with his hair standing on end, and his face wan and sallow, as if he had had a severe fever.  Pained that he did not seem to notice her, she wanted to attract his attention, and touched his arm with a familiar gesture.

‘I say, isn’t that one of your friends over there, looking for you?’

It was Dubuche, whom she knew from having seen him on one occasion at the Cafe Baudequin.  He was, with difficulty, elbowing his way through the crowd, and staring vaguely at the sea of heads around him.  But all at once, when Claude was trying to attract his notice by dint of gesticulations, the other turned his back to bow very low to a party of three—­the father short and fat, with a sanguine face; the mother very thin, of the colour of wax, and devoured by anemia; and the daughter so physically backward at eighteen, that she retained all the lank scragginess of childhood.

‘All right!’ muttered the painter.  ’There he’s caught now.  What ugly acquaintances the brute has!  Where can he have fished up such horrors?’

Gagniere quietly replied that he knew the strangers by sight.  M. Margaillan was a great masonry contractor, already a millionaire five or six times over, and was making his fortune out of the great public works of Paris, running up whole boulevards on his own account.  No doubt Dubuche had become acquainted with him through one of the architects he worked for.

However, Sandoz, compassionating the scragginess of the girl, whom he kept watching, judged her in one sentence.

‘Ah! the poor little flayed kitten.  One feels sorry for her.’

‘Let them alone!’ exclaimed Claude, ferociously.  ’They have all the crimes of the middle classes stamped on their faces; they reek of scrofula and idiocy.  It serves them right.  But hallo! our runaway friend is making off with them.  What grovellers architects are!  Good riddance.  He’ll have to look for us when he wants us!’

Dubuche, who had not seen his friends, had just offered his arm to the mother, and was going off, explaining the pictures with gestures typical of exaggerated politeness.

‘Well, let’s proceed then,’ said Fagerolles; and, addressing Gagniere, he asked, ‘Do you know where they have put Claude’s picture?’

‘I? no, I was looking for it—­I am going with you.’

He accompanied them, forgetting Irma Becot against the ‘line.’  It was she who had wanted to visit the Salon on his arm, and he was so little used to promenading a woman about, that he had constantly lost her on the way, and was each time stupefied to find her again beside him, no longer knowing how or why they were thus together.  She ran after them, and took his arm once more in order to follow Claude, who was already passing into another gallery with Fagerolles and Sandoz.