During the days that followed Nana found life adorable.  In the lad’s arms she was once more a girl of fifteen, and under the caressing influence of this renewed childhood love’s white flower once more blossomed forth in a nature which had grown hackneyed and disgusted in the service of the other sex.  She would experience sudden fits of shame, sudden vivid emotions, which left her trembling.  She wanted to laugh and to cry, and she was beset by nervous, maidenly feelings, mingled with warm desires that made her blush again.  Never yet had she felt anything comparable to this.  The country filled her with tender thoughts.  As a little girl she had long wished to dwell in a meadow, tending a goat, because one day on the talus of the fortifications she had seen a goat bleating at the end of its tether.  Now this estate, this stretch of land belonging to her, simply swelled her heart to bursting, so utterly had her old ambition been surpassed.  Once again she tasted the novel sensations experienced by chits of girls, and at night when she went upstairs, dizzy with her day in the open air and intoxicated by the scent of green leaves, and rejoined her Zizi behind the curtain, she fancied herself a schoolgirl enjoying a holiday escapade.  It was an amour, she thought, with a young cousin to whom she was going to be married.  And so she trembled at the slightest noise and dread lest parents should hear her, while making the delicious experiments and suffering the voluptuous terrors attendant on a girl’s first slip from the path of virtue.

Nana in those days was subject to the fancies a sentimental girl will indulge in.  She would gaze at the moon for hours.  One night she had a mind to go down into the garden with Georges when all the household was asleep.  When there they strolled under the trees, their arms round each other’s waists, and finally went and laid down in the grass, where the dew soaked them through and through.  On another occasion, after a long silence up in the bedroom, she fell sobbing on the lad’s neck, declaring in broken accents that she was afraid of dying.  She would often croon a favorite ballad of Mme Lerat’s, which was full of flowers and birds.  The song would melt her to tears, and she would break off in order to clasp Georges in a passionate embrace and to extract from him vows of undying affection.  In short she was extremely silly, as she herself would admit when they both became jolly good fellows again and sat up smoking cigarettes on the edge of the bed, dangling their bare legs over it the while and tapping their heels against its wooden side.

But what utterly melted the young woman’s heart was Louiset’s arrival.  She had an access of maternal affection which was as violent as a mad fit.  She would carry off her boy into the sunshine outside to watch him kicking about; she would dress him like a little prince and roll with him in the grass.  The moment he arrived she decided that he was to sleep near her, in the room next hers, where