"
Camille glanced at her mother's white robe, and then at her own dark
gown, which scarcely allowed her neck and wrists to be seen. "Yes," she
replied laughing, "I only look passable when I don't dress as a young
girl."
Eve, ill at ease, worried by the growth of a rivalry in which she did not
as yet wish to believe, changed the conversation. "Isn't your brother
there?" she asked.
"Why yes, we came down together."
Hyacinthe, who came in at that moment, shook hands with Gerard in a weary
way. He was twenty, and had inherited his mother's pale blond hair, and
her long face full of Oriental languor; while from his father he had
derived his grey eyes and thick lips, expressive of unscrupulous
appetites. A wretched scholar, regarding every profession with the same
contempt, he had decided to do nothing. Spoilt by his father, he took
some little interest in poetry and music, and lived in an extraordinary
circle of artists, low women, madmen and bandits; boasting himself of all
sorts of crimes and vices, professing the very worst philosophical and
social ideas, invariably going to extremes, becoming in turn a
Collectivist, an Individualist, an Anarchist, a Pessimist, a Symbolist,
and what not besides; without, however, ceasing to be a Catholic, as this
conjunction of Catholicity with something else seemed to him the supreme
/bon ton/. In reality he was simply empty and rather a fool.
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