Nana became suddenly very pale.

“Eh, what?” she cried.  “With a kick on my bottom?  He’s going too far, he is!  Look here, my little friend, it was I who threw him downstairs, the cuckold, for he is a cuckold, I must inform you.  His countess is making him one with every man she meets—­yes, even with that good-for-nothing of a Fauchery.  And that Mignon, who goes loafing about the pavement in behalf of his harridan of a wife, whom nobody wants because she’s so lean!  What a foul lot!  What a foul lot!”

She was choking, and she paused for breath

“Oh, that’s what they say, is it?  Very well, my little Francis, I’ll go and look ’em up, I will.  Shall you and I go to them at once?  Yes, I’ll go, and we’ll see whether they will have the cheek to go telling about kicks on the bottom.  Kick’s!  I never took one from anybody!  And nobody’s ever going to strike me—­d’ye see?—­for I’d smash the man who laid a finger on me!”

Nevertheless, the storm subsided at last.  After all, they might jolly well what they liked!  She looked upon them as so much filth underfoot!  It would have soiled her to bother about people like that.  She had a conscience of her own, she had!  And Francis, seeing her thus giving herself away, what with her housewife’s costume and all, became familiar and, at parting, made so bold as to give her some good advice.  It was wrong of her to be sacrificing everything for the sake of an infatuation; such infatuations ruined existence.  She listened to him with bowed head while he spoke to her with a pained expression, as became a connoisseur who could not bear to see so fine a girl making such a hash of things.

“Well, that’s my affair,” she said at last “Thanks all the same, dear boy.”  She shook his hand, which despite his perfect dress was always a little greasy, and then went off to buy her fish.  During the day that story about the kick on the bottom occupied her thoughts.  She even spoke about it to Fontan and again posed as a sturdy woman who was not going to stand the slightest flick from anybody.  Fontan, as became a philosophic spirit, declared that all men of fashion were beasts whom it was one’s duty to despise.  And from that moment forth Nana was full of very real disdain.

That same evening they went to the Bouffes-Parisiens Theatre to see a little woman of Fontan’s acquaintance make her debut in a part of some ten lines.  It was close on one o’clock when they once more trudged up the heights of Montmartre.  They had purchased a cake, a “mocha,” in the Rue de la Chaussee-d’Antin, and they ate it in bed, seeing that the night was not warm and it was not worth while lighting a fire.  Sitting up side by side, with the bedclothes pulled up in front and the pillows piled up behind, they supped and talked about the little woman.  Nana thought her plain and lacking in style.  Fontan, lying on his stomach, passed up the pieces of cake which had been put between the candle and the matches on the edge of the night table.  But they ended by quarreling.