At dinner that evening, Flavia, with fatal persistence, insisted upon
turning the conversation to M. Roux. She had been reading one of his
novels and had remembered anew that Paris set its watches by his clock.
Imogen surmised that she was tortured by a feeling that she had not
sufficiently appreciated him while she had had him. When she first
mentioned his name she was answered only by the pall of silence that
fell over the company. Then everyone began to talk at once, as though
to correct a false position. They spoke of him with a fervid, defiant
admiration, with the sort of hot praise that covers a double purpose.
Imogen fancied she could see that they felt a kind of relief at what the
man had done, even those who despised him for doing it; that they felt
a spiteful hate against Flavia, as though she had tricked them, and a
certain contempt for themselves that they had been beguiled. She was
reminded of the fury of the crowd in the fairy tale, when once the child
had called out that the king was in his night clothes. Surely these
people knew no more about Flavia than they had known before, but the
mere fact that the thing had been said altered the situation. Flavia,
meanwhile, sat chattering amiably, pathetically unconscious of her
nakedness.

Hamilton lounged, fingering the stem of his wineglass, gazing down the
table at one face after another and studying the various degrees
of self-consciousness they exhibited. Imogen's eyes followed his,
fearfully. When a lull came in the spasmodic flow of conversation,
Arthur, leaning back in his chair, remarked deliberately, "As for M.
Roux, his very profession places him in that class of men whom society
has never been able to accept unconditionally because it has never been
able to assume that they have any ordered notion of taste. He and
his ilk remain, with the mountebanks and snake charmers, people
indispensable to our civilization, but wholly unreclaimed by it; people
whom we receive, but whose invitations we do not accept."

Fortunately for Flavia, this mine was not exploded until just before the
coffee was brought. Her laughter was pitiful to hear; it echoed through
the silent room as in a vault, while she made some tremulously light
remark about her husband's drollery, grim as a jest from the dying. No
one responded and she sat nodding her head like a mechanical toy and
smiling her white, set smile through her teeth, until Alcee Buisson and
Frau Lichtenfeld came to he