Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/109

Rh under a strict law, in the art of evading the law itself. Rich, but insatiable, they wished to be even richer. The younger men, their heirs, already looked weary, care-ridden and prematurely old. They had the oldish foreheads of dejected men about town as much worn out by scheming as by dissipation. Although they were in society, they scrutinized and interrogated each other, their looks crossed swords as if it were necessary to play a careful game and "get" the other fellow. The practice of lying and of giving orders, the habit of deprecating and appraising everything, the instinct of craftiness and greed enveloped their persons with a feverish temperature. They could hardly refrain from being brusque even when people were polite to them. Their decorum was convulsive, their handshake seemed to feel the pulse of your fortune, and their fingers had soft and crafty flexions like those of a placid strangler who is about to twist the neck of a fat chicken. And in the very young, the greenhorns, and the fops, one felt the humiliation and the timidity of novices annoyed more because they had not yet begun to make money than because they could not spend it as they wished.

There was as much monotony and professional resemblance among the women. Only by the variety of plumage was the collective preoccupation masked and disguised. Fat mammas were stufifed into corsets far too tightly laced; bilious matrons seemed to have just broken a long fast, although the price of the cabochons illuminating their ear lobes was sufficient to feed fifty poor families for two years. As for the young girls, there were tall ones, thin ones, precocious ones; there were the unsophisticated, the elegant, the chubby, the blondes, the brunettes, the sentimental, the