“No, no, I wish—­you must—­a few minutes more.”  And the baroness threw a furtive look on the ancient and sumptuous clock in a corner of the room.

Five o’clock already, and the great Afchin not arrived.  The Levantines began to laugh behind their fans.  Happily tea was just being served, also Spanish wines, and a crowd of delicious Turkish cakes which were only to be had in that house, whose receipts, brought away with her by the favourite, had been preserved in the harem, like some secrets of confectionery on our convents.  That made a diversion.  Hemerlingue, who on Saturdays came out of his office from time to time to make his bow to the ladies, was drinking a glass of Madeira near the little table while talking to Maurice Trott, once the dresser of Said-Pasha, when his wife approached him, gently and quietly.  He knew what anger this impenetrable calm must cover, and asked her, in a low tone, timidly: 

“No one?”

“No one.  You see to what an insult you expose me.”

She smiled, her eyes half closed, taking with the end of her nail a crumb of cake from his long black whiskers, but her little transparent nostrils trembled with a terrible eloquence.

“Oh, she will come,” said the banker, his mouth full.  “I am sure she will come.”

The noise of dresses, of a train rustling in the next room made the baroness turn quickly.  But, to the great joy of the “bundles,” looking on from their corners, it was not the lady they were expecting.

This tall, elegant blonde, with worn features and irreproachable toilette, was not like Mlle. Afchin.  She was worthy in every way to bear a name as celebrated as that of Dr. Jenkins.  In the last two or three months the beautiful Mme. Jenkins had greatly changed, become much older.  In the life of a woman who has long remained young there comes a time when the years, which have passed over her head without leaving a wrinkle, trace their passage all at once brutally in indelible marks.  People no longer say, on seeing her, “How beautiful she is!” but “How beautiful she must have been!” And this cruel way of speaking in the past, of throwing back to a distant period that which was but yesterday a visible fact, marks a beginning of old age and of retirement, a change of all her triumphs into memories.  Was it the disappointment of seeing the doctor’s wife arrive, instead of Mme. Jansoulet, or did the discredit which the Duke de Mora’s death had thrown on the fashionable physician fall on her who bore his name?  There was a little of each of these reasons, and perhaps of another, in the cool greeting of the baroness.  A slight greeting on the ends of her lips, some hurried words, and she returned to the noble battalion nibbling vigorously away.  The room had become animated under the effects of wine.  People no longer whispered; they talked.  The lamps brought in added a new brilliance to the gathering, but announced that it was near its close; some indeed, not interested in the great event, having already taken their leave.  And still the Jansoulets did not come.