oom was full, and there was a continuous hum of men's
voices.

There were all the nocturnal vagabonds of Paris, idlers and workers, all
those who from seven o'clock in the evening know not what to do and dine
at the club, ready to catch at anything or anybody that chance may offer
to amuse them.

When the five friends were seated the banker Liverdy, a vigorous and
hearty man of forty, said to Bertin:

"You were in fine form this evening."

"Yes, I could have done surprising things to-day," Bertin replied.

The others smiled, and the landscape painter, Amaury Maldant, a thin
little bald-headed man with a gray beard, said, with a sly expression:

"I, too, always feel the rising of the sap in April; it makes me bring
forth a few leaves--half a dozen at most--then it runs into sentiment;
there never is any fruit."

The Marquis de Rocdiane and the Comte Landa sympathized with him. Both
were older than he, though even a keen eye could not guess their age;
clubmen, horsemen, swordsmen, whose incessant exercise had given them
bodies of steel, they boasted of being younger in every way than the
enervated good-for-nothings of the new generation.

Rocdiane, of good family, with the entree to all salons, though
suspected of financial intrigues of many kinds (which, according
to Bertin, was not surprising, since he had lived so much in the
gaming-houses), married, but separated from his wife, who paid him an
annuity, a director of Belgian and Portuguese banks, carried boldly upon
his energetic, Don Quixote-like face the somewhat tarnished honor of a
gentleman, which was occasionally brightened by the blood from a thrust
in a duel.

The Comte de Landa, a good-natured colossus, proud of his figure and
his shoulders, although married and the father of two children, found it
difficult to dine at home three times a week; he remained at the club on
the other days, with his friends, after the session in the fencing-hall.

"The club is a family," he said, "the family of those who as yet have
none, of those who never will have one, and of those who are bored by
their own."

The conversation branched off on the subject of women, glided from
anecdotes to reminiscences, from reminiscences to boasts, and then to
indiscreet confidences.

The Marquis de Rocdiane allowed the names of his inamoratas to be
guessed by unmistakable hints--society women whose names he did not
utter, so that their identity might be the better surmised. The