Then, his curiosity being roused, he followed the lady downstairs, to find out if she were pretty. But she hastened along with an anxious nimbleness, scarcely touching the Wilton carpet with her tiny boots, and leaving no trace in the house, save a faint odour of verbena. As he reached the vestibule, she disappeared, and he only beheld Monsieur Gourd standing under the porch, cap in hand and bowing very low to her.
When the young man had returned the doorkeeper his key, he tried to make him talk.
“She looks very lady-like,” said he. “Who is she?”
And he would add nothing further. But he was more communicative regarding the gentleman on the third floor. Oh! a man belonging to the very best society, who had taken that room to come and work there quietly, one night a week.
“Ah! he works!” interrupted Octave. “What at, pray!”
“He was kind enough to ask me to keep his room tidy for him,” continued Monsieur Gourd, without appearing to have heard the question. “And, you know, he pays money down. Ah! sir, when one waits on people, one soon knows whether they are decent He is everything that is most respectable: it is easily seen by his clothes.”
He was obliged to jump on one side, and Octave himself had to enter the doorkeepers’ room for a moment, in order to let the carriage of the second floor people, who were going to the Bois, pass. The horses pawed the ground, held back by the coachman the reins high; and, when the big closed landau rolled under the vaulted roof, one beheld through the windows two handsome children, whose smiling faces almost hid the vague profiles of the father and mother. Monsieur Gourd drew himself up, polite, but cold.
“They don’t make much noise in the house,” observed Octave.
“No one makes any noise,” said the doorkeeper, curtly.
“Eaeh one lives as he thinks best, that’s all. There are people who know how to live, and there are people who don’t know how to live.”
The second floor tenants were judged severely, because they associated with no one. They appeared to be well off, however; but the husband wrote books, and Monsieur Gourd mistrusted him, curling his lip with contempt; more especially as no knew what the family was up to in there, with its air of requiring nobody, and being always perfectly happy. It did not seem to him natural.