VII
HEMIXEM
Happy Laurent! At the wharf, exulting in his new clothes, carrying his head high, he mixed with the guests with a confidence and an equality that he had never before felt. There were at least thirty people in the party. Ladies and girls in fresh, delicate summer gowns, gentlemen in elegant negligé, straw hat and white flannels. Not only was Laurent as well dressed as they, but even better dressed, and the Saint-Fardier boys, two prigs of eighteen and twenty, to whom Gina introduced him as a young savage reputed to be incorrigible, but in the process of being trained, looked askance, exchanging a smile of understanding with the young girl, which, at any other moment, would have quite taken the starch out of Laurent. That smile commented clearly upon the anomaly of his city clothes.
Athanasius and Gaston were inseparable, and always dressed alike, so that they looked like two fingers from the same hand, or two stalks of asparagus from the same box. Spare, pale, unhealthy looking, they made their weak tonsils a pretext for exaggerating the height of their collars and for periodically muffling up their throats.
The widow Saint-Fardier, their grandmother, mistress of a gouty and almost imbecile nobleman, had
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