“What!  It is you, doctor?  The devil take it!  What is the time then?  I’m not visible.”

“Not even for the doctor?”

“Oh, for nobody.  Question of etiquette, mon cher.  No matter, come in all the same.  You’ll warm your feet for a moment while Francis finishes doing my hair.”

Jenkins entered the bed-chamber, a banal place like all furnished apartments, and moved towards the fire on which there were set to heat curling-tongs of all sizes, while in the contiguous laboratory, separated from the room by a curtain of Algerian tapestry, the Marquis de Monpavon gave himself up to the manipulations of his valet.  Odours of patchouli, of cold-cream, of hartshorn, and of singed hair escaped from the part of the room which was shut off, and from time to time, when Francis came to fetch a curling-iron, Jenkins caught sight of a huge dressing-table laden with a thousand little instruments of ivory, and mother-of-pearl, with steel files, scissors, puffs, and brushes, with bottles, with little trays, with cosmetics, labelled and arranged methodically in groups and lines; and amid all this display, awkward and already shaky, an old man’s hand, shrunken and long, delicately trimmed and polished about the nails like that of a Japanese painter, which faltered about among this fine hardware and doll’s china.

While continuing the process of making up his face, the longest, the most complicated of his morning occupations, Monpavon chatted with the doctor, told of his little ailments, and the good effect of the pills.  They made him young again, he said.  And at a distance, thus, without seeing him, one would have taken him for the Duc de Mora, to such a degree had he usurped his manner of speech.  There were the same unfinished phrases, ended by “ps, ps, ps,” muttered between the teeth, expressions like “What’s its name?” “Who was it?” constantly thrown into what he was saying, a kind of aristocratic stutter, fatigued, listless, wherein you might perceive a profound contempt for the vulgar art of speech.  In the society of which the duke was the centre, every one sought to imitate that accent, those disdainful intonations with an affectation of simplicity.

Jenkins, finding the sitting rather long, had risen to take his departure.

“Adieu, I must be off.  We shall see you at the Nabob’s?”

“Yes, I intend to be there for luncheon.  Promised to bring him—­what’s his name.  Who was it?  What?  You know, for our big affair—­ps, ps, ps.  Were it not for that, should gladly stay away.  Real menagerie, that house.”

The Irishman, despite his benevolence, agreed that the society was rather mixed at his friend’s.  But then!  One could hardly blame him for it.  The poor fellow, he knew no better.

“Neither knows nor is willing to learn,” remarked Monpavon with bitterness.  “Instead of consulting people of experience—­ps, ps, ps—­first sponger that comes along.  Have you seen the horses that Bois l’Hery has persuaded him to buy?  Absolute rubbish those animals.  And he paid twenty thousand francs for them.  We may wager that Bois l’Hery got them for six thousand.”