“You sang your numbers marvelously,” said the prince.

And with that they began a conversation, but their sentences were short and their pauses frequent.  Nana, indeed, was not always able to reply.  After rubbing cold cream over her arms and face with the palm of her hand she laid on the grease paint with the corner of a towel.  For one second only she ceased looking in the glass and smilingly stole a glance at the prince.

“His Highness is spoiling me,” she murmured without putting down the grease paint.

Her task was a complicated one, and the Marquis de Chouard followed it with an expression of devout enjoyment.  He spoke in his turn.

“Could not the band accompany you more softly?” he said.  “It drowns your voice, and that’s an unpardonable crime.”

This time Nana did not turn round.  She had taken up the hare’s-foot and was lightly manipulating it.  All her attention was concentrated on this action, and she bent forward over her toilet table so very far that the white round contour of her drawers and the little patch of chemise stood out with the unwonted tension.  But she was anxious to prove that she appreciated the old man’s compliment and therefore made a little swinging movement with her hips.

Silence reigned.  Mme Jules had noticed a tear in the right leg of her drawers.  She took a pin from over her heart and for a second or so knelt on the ground, busily at work about Nana’s leg, while the young woman, without seeming to notice her presence, applied the rice powder, taking extreme pains as she did so, to avoid putting any on the upper part of her cheeks.  But when the prince remarked that if she were to come and sing in London all England would want to applaud her, she laughed amiably and turned round for a moment with her left cheek looking very white amid a perfect cloud of powder.  Then she became suddenly serious, for she had come to the operation of rouging.  And with her face once more close to the mirror, she dipped her finger in a jar and began applying the rouge below her eyes and gently spreading it back toward her temples.  The gentlemen maintained a respectful silence.

Count Muffat, indeed, had not yet opened his lips.  He was thinking perforce of his own youth.  The bedroom of his childish days had been quite cold, and later, when he had reached the age of sixteen and would give his mother a good-night kiss every evening, he used to carry the icy feeling of the embrace into the world of dreams.  One day in passing a half-open door he had caught sight of a maidservant washing herself, and that was the solitary recollection which had in any way troubled his peace of mind from the days of puberty till the time of marriage.  Afterward he had found his wife strictly obedient to her conjugal duties but had himself felt a species of religious dislike to them.  He had grown to man’s estate and was now aging, in ignorance of the flesh, in the humble observance of rigid devotional practices and in obedience to a rule of life full of precepts and moral laws.  And now suddenly he was dropped down in this actress’s dressing room in the presence of this undraped courtesan.