Cottard said to her husband encouragingly, “tell us your odyssey.” “Well, really, it is quite out of the ordinary,” said the doctor, and repeated his narrative from the beginning. “When I saw that the train was in the station, I stood thunderstruck. It was all Ski’s fault. You are somewhat wide of the mark in your information, my dear fellow! And there was Brichot waiting for us at the station!” “I assumed,” said the scholar, casting around him what he could still muster of a glance and smiling with his thin lips, “that if you had been detained at Graincourt, it would mean that you had encountered some peripatetic siren.” “Will you hold your tongue, if my wife were to hear you!” said the Professor. “This wife of mine, it is jealous.” “Ah! That Brichot,” cried Ski, moved to traditional merriment by Brichot’s spicy witticism, “he is always the same;” albeit he had no reason to suppose that the university don had ever indulged in obscenity. And, to embellish this consecrated utterance with the ritual gesture, he made as though he could not resist the desire to pinch Brichot’s leg. “He never changes, the rascal,” Ski went on, and without stopping to think of the effect, at once tragic and comic, that the don’s semi-blindness gave to his words: “Always a sharp lookout for the ladies.” “You see,” said