great toe hidden under the satin of a lady's slipper or the leather of
a man's boot.

But the exit!--for we must allow for occasions where you have omitted
your rigid scrutiny at the threshold of the doorway, and in that case
the exit becomes of vital importance, and all the more so because this
fresh study of the celibate ought to be made on the same lines, but
from an opposite point of view, from that which we have already
outlined.

In the exit the situation assumes a special gravity; for then is the
moment in which the enemy has crossed all the intrenchments within
which he was subject to our examination and has escaped into the
street! At this point a man of understanding when he sees a visitor
passing under the _porte-cochere_ should be able to divine the import
of the whole visit. The indications are indeed fewer in number, but
how distinct is their character! The denouement has arrived and the
man instantly betrays the importance of it by the frankest expression
of happiness, pain or joy.

These revelations are therefore easy to apprehend; they appear in the
glance cast either at the building or at the windows of the apartment;
in a slow or loitering gait, in the rubbing of hands, on the part of a
fool, in the bounding gait of a coxcomb, or the involuntary arrest of
his footsteps, which marks the man who is deeply moved; in a word, you
see upon the stoop certain questions as clearly proposed to you as if
a provincial academy had offered a hundred crowns for an essay; but in
the exit you behold the solution of these questions clearly and
precisely given to you. Our task would be far above the power of human
intelligence if it consisted in enumerating the different ways by