of a child.  The sight of herself always astonished her, and she would look as surprised and ecstatic as a young girl who has discovered her puberty.  Slowly, slowly, she spread out her arms in order to give full value to her figure, which suggested the torso of a plump Venus.  She bent herself this way and that and examined herself before and behind, stooping to look at the side view of her bosom and at the sweeping contours of her thighs.  And she ended with a strange amusement which consisted of swinging to right and left, her knees apart and her body swaying from the waist with the perpetual jogging, twitching movements peculiar to an oriental dancer in the danse du ventre.

Muffat sat looking at her.  She frightened him.  The newspaper had dropped from his hand.  For a moment he saw her as she was, and he despised himself.  Yes, it was just that; she had corrupted his life; he already felt himself tainted to his very marrow by impurities hitherto undreamed of.  Everything was now destined to rot within him, and in the twinkling of an eye he understood what this evil entailed.  He saw the ruin brought about by this kind of “leaven”—­himself poisoned, his family destroyed, a bit of the social fabric cracking and crumbling.  And unable to take his eyes from the sight, he sat looking fixedly at her, striving to inspire himself with loathing for her nakedness.

Nana no longer moved.  With an arm behind her neck, one hand clasped in the other, and her elbows far apart, she was throwing back her head so that he could see a foreshortened reflection of her half-closed eyes, her parted lips, her face clothed with amorous laughter.  Her masses of yellow hair were unknotted behind, and they covered her back with the fell of a lioness.

Bending back thus, she displayed her solid Amazonian waist and firm bosom, where strong muscles moved under the satin texture of the skin.  A delicate line, to which the shoulder and the thigh added their slight undulations, ran from one of her elbows to her foot, and Muffat’s eyes followed this tender profile and marked how the outlines of the fair flesh vanished in golden gleams and how its rounded contours shone like silk in the candlelight.  He thought of his old dread of Woman, of the Beast of the Scriptures, at once lewd and wild.  Nana was all covered with fine hair; a russet made her body velvety, while the Beast was apparent in the almost equine development of her flanks, in the fleshy exuberances and deep hollows of her body, which lent her sex the mystery and suggestiveness lurking in their shadows.  She was, indeed, that Golden Creature, blind as brute force, whose very odor ruined the world.  Muffat gazed and gazed as a man possessed, till at last, when he had shut his eyes in order to escape it, the Brute reappeared in the darkness of the brain, larger, more terrible, more suggestive in its attitude.  Now, he understood, it would remain before his eyes, in his very flesh, forever.