"Monsieur, what shall I answer this lady?" asked the valet, astonished at the prolonged silence of his master.
"One minute, you rascal; wait my orders," replied Pascal, abruptly. "Come, keep calm, keep calm," thought he to himself. "Excitement now would lose all, would paralyse my plans. It is a terrible part to play, but having such a fine game at hand, I believe I would blow my brains out with rage if, through awkwardness now, I should lose it."
After another silence, during which he succeeded in mastering his agitation, he said to himself:
"I am calm now. Let her come, I can play a sure game." Then he said aloud to his valet:
The servant went out and soon returned to open the door and announce, "Madame the Marquise de Miranda."
Madeleine, contrary to her custom, was dressed, as she had said to the prince, no longer like a grandmother, but with a dainty elegance which rendered her beauty still more irresistible. A Pamela hat of rice straw, ornamented with ears of corn mingled with corn-flowers, relieved and revealed her face and neck; a new gown of white muslin, also strewn with corn-flowers, delineated the outlines of her incomparable figure, the finished type of refined elegance, the voluptuous flexibility characteristic of Mexican Creoles, while her gauze scarf rose and fell in gentle undulations with the tranquil breathing of her marble bosom.
Pascal stood a moment dazzled, fascinated.
He beheld Madeleine a thousand times more beautiful, more attractive, more interesting than the day before. And, although a fine judge, as he had said to the prince, although he had enjoyed and abused all those treasures of beauty, grace, and youth which misery renders tributary to wealth, never in his life had he dreamed of such a creature as Madeleine; and strange, or rather natural to this brutalised man, deprived by satiety of all pleasures, he evoked the same moment the virginal figure of Antonine by the side of the marquise. For him, Venus Aphrodite was perfected by Hebe.
Madeleine, taking advantage of the involuntary silence of Pascal, said in a dry, haughty tone, and without making the slightest allusion to the scene of the day before, notwithstanding the words added to her name on the card: