He entered in a mood which made him as good as a new sunbeam to the already well-lit first classe . The morning light playing amongst our plants and laughing on our walls, caught an added lustre from M. Paul’s all-benignant salute. Like a true Frenchman (though I don’t know why I should say so, for he was of strain neither French nor Labassecourien), he had dressed for the “situation” and the occasion. Not by the vague folds, sinister and conspirator-like, of his soot-dark paletôt were the outlines of his person obscured; on the contrary, his figure (such as it was, I don’t boast of it) was well set off by a civilized coat and a silken vest quite pretty to behold. The defiant and pagan bonnet-grec

He passed to his desk; he placed on the same his hat and gloves. “ Bon jour, mes amies ,” 176 said he, in a tone that somehow made amends to some amongst us for many a sharp snap and savage snarl: not a jocund, good-fellow tone, still less an unctuous priestly, accent, but a voice he had belonging to himself⁠—a voice used when his heart passed the words to his lips. That same heart did speak sometimes; though an irritable, it was not an ossified organ: in its core was a place, tender beyond a man’s tenderness; a place that humbled him to little children, that bound him to girls and women to whom, rebel as he would, he could not disown his affinity, nor quite deny that, on the whole, he was better with them than with his own sex.