twelve-year-old chit, answered every question put to her with “Yes, Mamma!  No, Mamma!” in a winy-piny tone, her fingers in her nose.  At last Jupiter, with the severity of a master who is growing cross, shut Love up in a dark closet, bidding her conjugate the verb “I love” twenty times.  The finale was more appreciated:  it was a chorus which both troupe and orchestra performed with great brilliancy.  But the curtain once down, the clappers tried in vain to obtain a call, while the whole house was already up and making for the doors.

The crowd trampled and jostled, jammed, as it were, between the rows of seats, and in so doing exchanged expressions.  One phrase only went round: 

“It’s idiotic.”  A critic was saying that it would be one’s duty to do a pretty bit of slashing.  The piece, however, mattered very little, for people were talking about Nana before everything else.  Fauchery and La Faloise, being among the earliest to emerge, met Steiner and Mignon in the passage outside the stalls.  In this gaslit gut of a place, which was as narrow and circumscribed as a gallery in a mine, one was well-nigh suffocated.  They stopped a moment at the foot of the stairs on the right of the house, protected by the final curve of the balusters.  The audience from the cheap places were coming down the steps with a continuous tramp of heavy boots; a stream of black dress coats was passing, while an attendant was making every possible effort to protect a chair, on which she had piled up coats and cloaks, from the onward pushing of the crowd.

“Surely I know her,” cried Steiner, the moment he perceived Fauchery.  “I’m certain I’ve seen her somewhere—­at the casino, I imagine, and she got herself taken up there—­she was so drunk.”

“As for me,” said the journalist, “I don’t quite know where it was.  I am like you; I certainly have come across her.”

He lowered his voice and asked, laughing: 

“At the Tricons’, perhaps.”

“Egad, it was in a dirty place,” Mignon declared.  He seemed exasperated.  “It’s disgusting that the public give such a reception to the first trollop that comes by.  There’ll soon be no more decent women on the stage.  Yes, I shall end by forbidding Rose to play.”

Fauchery could not restrain a smile.  Meanwhile the downward shuffle of the heavy shoes on the steps did not cease, and a little man in a workman’s cap was heard crying in a drawling voice: 

“Oh my, she ain’t no wopper!  There’s some pickings there!”

In the passage two young men, delicately curled and formally resplendent in turndown collars and the rest, were disputing together.  One of them was repeating the words, “Beastly, beastly!” without stating any reasons; the other was replying with the words, “Stunning, stunning!” as though he, too, disdained all argument.