“Too late.”
Lilian rang and asked for her cloak. When the maid had left the room:
“Oh, I wanted to say to you, before Robert arrives, that if he proposes an investment for your fifty thousand francs—be careful. He is very rich, but he is always in want of money. There! look and see. I think I hear his horn. He’s half an hour before the time; but so much the better. … For all we were saying! …”
“I’m early,” said Robert as he came into the room, “because I thought it would be amusing to go and dine at Versailles. Do you agree?”
“No,” said Lady Griffith; “the fountains bore me. I had rather go to Rambouillet; there’s time. We shan’t have such a good dinner, but we shall be able to talk more easily. I want Vincent to tell you his fish stories. He knows some marvellous ones. I don’t know if what he says is true, but it’s more amusing than the best novel in the world.”
“That’s not perhaps what a novelist will think,” said Vincent.
Robert de Passavant held an evening paper in his hand:
“D’you know that Brugnard has just been made assistant-secretary at the Ministry of Justice? Now’s the moment to get your father decorated,” said he, turning to Vincent. Vincent shrugged his shoulders.
“My dear Vincent,” went on Passavant, “allow me to say that you’ll very much offend him by not asking this little favour—which he’ll be so delighted to refuse.”
“Suppose you were to start by asking it for yourself,” Vincent replied.
Robert made an affected little grimace:
“No; for my part, my vanity consists in never blushing—not even in my buttonhole.” Then, turning to Lilian:
“Do you know it’s rare nowadays to find a man who has reached forty without either the syph or the legion of honour?”
Lilian smiled and shrugged her shoulders:
“For the sake of a bon mot he actually consents to make himself out older than he is! I say, is it a quotation from your next book? It’ll be tasty. … Go on downstairs. I’ll get my cloak and follow you.”
“I thought you had given up seeing him,” said Vincent to Robert on the staircase.
“Who? Brugnard?”
“You said he was so stupid. …”
“My dear friend,” replied Passavant, pausing on a step and holding up Molinier, for he saw Lady Griffith coming and wanted her to hear: “you must know there’s not a single one of my friends whom I’ve known a certain time, that hasn’t given me unmistakable proofs of imbecility. I assure you that Brugnard resisted the test longer than a great many others.”
“Than I, perhaps?” asked Vincent.
“Which doesn’t prevent me from being your best friend … as you see.”
“And that’s what’s called wit in Paris,” said Lilian, who had joined them. “Take care, Robert; there’s nothing fades quicker.”
“Don’t be alarmed, dear lady; words only fade when they’re printed.”
They took their places in the car and drove off. As their conversation continued to be very witty, it is useless to record it here. They sat down to table on the terrace of a hotel overlooking a garden where the shades of night were gathering. Under cover of the evening, their talk grew slower and graver; urged on by Lilian and Robert, Vincent found himself at last the only speaker.
XVII
The Evening at Rambouillet
“I should take more interest in animals if I were less interested in men,” Robert had said. And Vincent had replied:
“Perhaps you think them too different. Every single one of the great discoveries in zoology has left its mark upon the study of man. The whole subject is interlinked and interdependent, and I believe that a novelist who also prides himself upon being a psychologist can never turn aside his eyes from the spectacle of nature and remain ignorant of her laws without paying for it. In the Goncourts’ Journal, which you gave me to read, I fell upon an account of a visit they paid to the Zoological houses in the Jardin des Plantes, in which your charming authors deplore Nature’s—or the Lord’s—lack of imagination. This paltry blasphemy merely serves to show up the stupidity and incomprehension of their small minds. On the contrary, what astonishing diversity! It seems as if Nature had essayed one after the other every possible manner of living and moving, as if she had taken advantage of every permission granted by matter and its laws. What a lesson can be read in the progressive abandonment of certain palaeontological experiments which proved irrational and inelegant; the economy which has enabled some forms to survive explains why the others were abandoned. Botany is instructive, too. When I examine a plant, I observe that at the place where each leaf springs from the stem, a bud lies sheltered, which is capable in its turn of shooting into life the following year. When I remark that out of all these buds, two at most are destined to come to anything, and that by the very fact of their growth they condemn all the others to atrophy, I cannot help thinking that the case is the same with men. The buds which develop naturally are always the terminal buds—that is to say, those that are farthest away from the parent trunk. It is only by pruning or layering that the sap is driven back and so forced to give life to those germs which are nearest the trunk and which would otherwise have lain dormant. And in this manner, the most recalcitrant plants, which, if left to themselves, would no doubt have produced nothing but leaves, are induced to bear fruit. Oh! an orchard or a garden is
