erself
particularly touched.

"What a pity!" she said to herself, glancing alternately at Zibeline and
at her brother, between whom a tone of frank comradeship had been
established, free from any coquetry on her side or from gallantry on his.

The more clearly Henri divined the thoughts of his sister, the more he
affected to remain insensible to the natural seductions of his neighbor,
to whom Lenaieff, on the contrary, addressed continually, in his soft and
caressing voice, compliments upon compliments and madrigals upon
madrigals!

"Take care, my dear Constantin!" said Henri to him, bluntly. "You will
make Mademoiselle de Vermont quite impossible. If you go on thus, she
will take herself seriously as a divinity!"

"Fortunately," rejoined Zibeline, "you are there, General, to remind me
that I am only a mortal, as Philippe's freedman reminded his master every
morning."

"You can not complain! I serve you as a confederate, to allow you to
display your erudition," retorted the General, continuing his persiflage.

But he, too, was only a man, wavering and changeable, to use Montaigne's
expression, for his eyes, contradicting the brusqueness of his speech,
rested long, and not without envy, on this beautiful and tempting fruit
which his fate forbade him to gather. The more he admired her freshness,
and the more he inhaled her sweetness, the more the image of Eugenie
Gontier was gradually effaced from his memory, like one of those tableaux
on the stage, which gauze curtains, descending from the flies, seem to
absorb without removing, gradually obliterating the pictures as they
fall, one after another.

CHAPTER XXI

A DASHING AMAZON

On leaving the table, the fair "Amphitryonne" proposed that the gentlemen
should use her private office as a smoking-room, and the ladies followed
them thither, pretending that the odor of tobacco would not annoy them in
the least, but in reality to inspect this new room.

Edmond Delorme had finished his work that very morning, and the enormous
canvas, with its life-size subject, had already been hung, lighted from
above and below by electric bulbs, the battery for which was cleverly
hidden behind a piece of furniture.

The portrait, bearing a striking resemblance to the original, was indeed
that of "the most dashing of all the Amazons on the Bois," to quote the
words of the artist, who was a better painter of portraits than of
animals, but who, in this case, could not separate