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By Root 1349 0

o‘clock. Bijou, the Scotch terrier, woke her by licking her face; and then she would play with him for five minutes, as he jumped about over her arms and legs, and even onto the count. Bijou was the first of whom he was jealous. It was not proper that an animal should thrust his nose under the bed-clothes in that way. Towards eleven o’clock, Francis came to do up her hair, preparatory to the complicated head-dress of the evening. At lunch, as she detested eating alone, she generally had Madame Maloir, who arrived in the morning from no one knew where, with her extraordinary bonnets, and returned at night to the mystery of her life without anybody troubling themselves about it. But the worst time was the two or three hours between luncheon and the evening toilet. Ordinarily she proposed a game at bezique to her old friend; sometimes she read the “Figaro,” the theatrical and fashionable news in which interested her; she even occasionally opened a book, for she prided herself on her taste for literature. Her toilet occupied her until nearly five o’clock. Then only she seemed to awake from her long somnolence, going out in her carriage or receiving a host of men at home, often dining-out, going to bed very late, and rising the next morning with the same fatigue, and beginning a fresh day to pass it in a similar manner.

Her great diversion was to go to Batignolles to see her little Louis at her aunt’s. For fifteen days together she would forget him entirely. Then she would be seized with a rage to see him, and hurry there on foot, full of the modesty and tenderness of a good mother, bringing all sorts of presents, as though for an invalid—snuff for the aunt, oranges and sweeties for the child; or else she would call in her laudau on her return from the Bois, attired in such loud dresses that they would upset the whole street. Ever since her niece had become such a grand lady, Madame Lerat had been puffed up with vanity. She called but rarely at the Avenue de Villiers, pretending that it was not her place; but she triumphed in her own street, happy when the young woman arrived in dresses costing four or five thousand francs, and occupied all the morrow in showing her presents, and quoting figures which amazed her neighbours. Generally, Nana reserved Sunday for her family, and on that day, if Muffat asked her to go anywhere, she refused, smiling like a young house-wife. It was not possible, she was going to dine with her aunt, she was going to see her baby. With all that, poor little Louis was always ill. He was nearly three years old, and was getting quite a big fellow; but he had had an attack of eczema on the back of his neck, and now he had deposits in his ears, which made them fear a caries of the bones of the cranium. When she saw him looking so pale, with his poor blood, and his soft flesh spotted with yellow, she became very serious, and above all she was greatly surprised. What could be the matter with the love for him to sicken like that? She, his mother, was always so well!

The days when her child did not engage her attention, Nana relapsed into the noisy monotony of her existence—drives in the Bois, first nights at theatres, dinners and suppers at the Maison Dorée or the Café Anglais; then all the public resorts, all the sights where the crowds flocked—Mabille,ax reviews, races. But she still retained that empty feeling of stupid idleness, which gave her pains in her inside. In spite of the constant infatuations in which her heart indulged, she would stretch her arms the moment she was alone, with a gesture of immense fatigue. Solitude made her sad at once, for she found herself again with the empty feeling, and the tedium of her own society. Very gay by profession and by nature, she would then become lugubrious, and would constantly sum up her life in this cry, between two yawns,

“Oh! how men bore me!”

One afternoon, as she was returning home from a concert, Nana noticed a woman passing along the Rue Montmartre, with boots trodden down at heel, dirty skirts, and a bonnet that had evidently been frequently soaked