It resulted from this little incident that silence reigned in the salon while the three took their coffee, a silence rather annoying to Adam, who was incapable of imagining the cause of it. Clementine no longer tried to draw out Thaddeus. The captain, on the other hand, retreated within his military stiffness and came out of it no more, neither on the way to the Opera nor in the box, where he seemed to be asleep.
“You see, madame, that I am a very stupid man,” he said during the dance in the last act of “Guillaume Tell.” “Am I not right to keep, as the saying is, to my own specialty?”
“In truth, my dear captain, you are neither a talker nor a man of the world, but you are perhaps Polish.”
“Therefore leave me to look after your pleasures, your property, your household--it is all I am good for.”
“Tartufe! pooh!” cried Adam, laughing. “My dear, he is full of ardor; he is thoroughly educated; he can, if he chooses, hold his own in any salon. Clementine, don’t believe his modesty.”
“Adieu, comtesse; I have obeyed your wishes so far; and now I will take the carriage and go home to bed and send it back for you.”
Clementine bowed her head and let him go without replying.
“What a bear!” she said to the count. “You are a great deal nicer.”
Adam pressed her hand when no one was looking.
“Poor, dear Thaddeus,” he said, “he is trying to make himself disagreeable where most men would try to seem more amiable than I.”
“Oh!” she said, “I am not sure but what there is some _calculation_ in his behavior; he would have taken in an ordinary woman.”
Half an hour later, when the chasseur, Boleslas, called out “Gate!” and the carriage was waiting for it to swing back, Clementine said to her husband, “Where does the captain perch?”
“Why, there!” replied Adam, pointing to a floor above the porte-cochere which had one window looking on the street. “His apartments are over the coachhouse.”
“Who lives on the other side?” asked the countess.
“No one as yet,” said Adam; “I mean that apartment for our children and their instructors.”
“He didn’t go to bed,” said the countess, observing lights in Thaddeus’s rooms when the carriage had passed under the portico supported by columns copied from those of the Tuileries, which replaced a vulgar zinc awning painted in stripes like cloth.