I wanted to speak to Saint-Loup, but he was so full of his indignation with the dancer that it adhered exactly to the surface of his eyeballs; like a subcutaneous structure it distended his cheeks with the result that, his internal agitation expressing itself externally in an entire immobility, he had not even the power of relaxation, the “play” necessary to take in a word from me and to answer it. The journalist’s friends, seeing that the incident was at an end, gathered round him again, still trembling. But, ashamed of having deserted him, they were absolutely determined that he should be made to suppose that they had noticed nothing. And so they dilated, one upon the speck of dust in his eye, one upon his false alarm when he had thought that the curtain was going up, the third upon the astonishing resemblance between a man who had just gone by and the speaker’s brother. Indeed they seemed quite to resent their friend’s not having shared their several emotions.

“What, didn’t it strike you? You must be going blind.”

“What I say is that you’re a pack of curs,” growled the journalist whom Saint-Loup had punished.