at Satin’s, sitting doing nothing on the untidy bed, while basins stood about on the floor at her feet and petticoats which had been bemired last night hung over the backs of armchairs and stained them with mud.  They had long gossips together and were endlessly confidential, while Satin lay on her stomach in her nightgown, waving her legs above her head and smoking cigarettes as she listened.  Sometimes on such afternoons as they had troubles to retail they treated themselves to absinthe in order, as they termed it, “to forget.”  Satin did not go downstairs or put on a petticoat but simply went and leaned over the banisters and shouted her order to the portress’s little girl, a chit of ten, who when she brought up the absinthe in a glass would look furtively at the lady’s bare legs.  Every conversation led up to one subject—­the beastliness of the men.  Nana was overpowering on the subject of Fontan.  She could not say a dozen words without lapsing into endless repetitions of his sayings and his doings.  But Satin, like a good-natured girl, would listen unwearyingly to everlasting accounts of how Nana had watched for him at the window, how they had fallen out over a burnt dish of hash and how they had made it up in bed after hours of silent sulking.  In her desire to be always talking about these things Nana had got to tell of every slap that he dealt her.  Last week he had given her a swollen eye; nay, the night before he had given her such a box on the ear as to throw her across the night table, and all because he could not find his slippers.  And the other woman did not evince any astonishment but blew out cigarette smoke and only paused a moment to remark that, for her part, she always ducked under, which sent the gentleman pretty nearly sprawling.  Both of them settled down with a will to these anecdotes about blows; they grew supremely happy and excited over these same idiotic doings about which they told one another a hundred times or more, while they gave themselves up to the soft and pleasing sense of weariness which was sure to follow the drubbings they talked of.  It was the delight of rediscussing Fontan’s blows and of explaining his works and his ways, down to the very manner in which he took off his boots, which brought Nana back daily to Satin’s place.  The latter, moreover, used to end by growing sympathetic in her turn and would cite even more violent cases, as, for instance, that of a pastry cook who had left her for dead on the floor.  Yet she loved him, in spite of it all!  Then came the days on which Nana cried and declared that things could not go on as they were doing.  Satin would escort her back to her own door and would linger an hour out in the street to see that he did not murder her.  And the next day the two women would rejoice over the reconciliation the whole afternoon through.  Yet though they did not say so, they preferred the days when threshings were, so to speak, in the air, for then their comfortable indignation was all the stronger.