Nana nodded with much satisfaction.  It was the old substantial dinner you get in a country hotel and consisted of vol-au-vent a la financiere, fowl boiled in rice, beans with a sauce and vanilla creams, iced and flavored with burnt sugar.  The ladies made an especial onslaught on the boiled fowl and rice:  their stays seemed about to burst; they wiped their lips with slow, luxurious movements.  At first Nana had been afraid of meeting old friends who might have asked her silly questions, but she grew calm at last, for she recognized no one she knew among that extremely motley throng, where faded dresses and lamentable hats contrasted strangely with handsome costumes, the wearers of which fraternized in vice with their shabbier neighbors.  She was momentarily interested, however, at the sight of a young man with short curly hair and insolent face who kept a whole tableful of vastly fat women breathlessly attentive to his slightest caprice.  But when the young man began to laugh his bosom swelled.

“Good lack, it’s a woman!”

She let a little cry escape as she spoke, and Satin, who was stuffing herself with boiled fowl, lifted up her head and whispered: 

“Oh yes!  I know her.  A smart lot, eh?  They do just fight for her.”

Nana pouted disgustingly.  She could not understand the thing as yet.  Nevertheless, she remarked in her sensible tone that there was no disputing about tastes or colors, for you never could tell what you yourself might one day have a liking for.  So she ate her cream with an air of philosophy, though she was perfectly well aware that Satin with her great blue virginal eyes was throwing the neighboring tables into a state of great excitement.  There was one woman in particular, a powerful, fair-haired person who sat close to her and made herself extremely agreeable.  She seemed all aglow with affection and pushed toward the girl so eagerly that Nana was on the point of interfering.

But at that very moment a woman who was entering the room gave her a shock of surprise.  Indeed, she had recognized Mme Robert.  The latter, looking, as was her wont, like a pretty brown mouse, nodded familiarly to the tall, lean serving maid and came and leaned upon Laure’s counter.  Then both women exchanged a long kiss.  Nana thought such an attention on the part of a woman so distinguished looking very amusing, the more so because Mme Robert had quite altered her usual modest expression.  On the contrary, her eye roved about the saloon as she kept up a whispered conversation.  Laure had resumed her seat and once more settled herself down with all the majesty of an old image of Vice, whose face has been worn and polished by the kisses of the faithful.  Above the range of loaded plates she sat enthroned in all the opulence which a hotelkeeper enjoys after forty years of activity, and as she sat there she swayed her bloated following of large women, in comparison with the biggest of whom she seemed monstrous.