Zoe had to push him in front of her.  When Nana was able to rejoin them in the drawing room downstairs she scolded them both, and Zoe pursed up her lips and took her departure with a vexed expression, remarking that she had only been anxious to give Madame a pleasure.  Georges was so glad to see Nana again and gazed at her with such delight that his fine eyes began filling with tears.  The miserable days were over now; his mother believed him to have grown reasonable and had allowed him to leave Les Fondettes.  Accordingly, the moment he had reached the terminus, he had got a conveyance in order the more quickly to come and kiss his sweet darling.  He spoke of living at her side in future, as he used to do down in the country when he waited for her, barefooted, in the bedroom at La Mignotte.  And as he told her about himself, he let his fingers creep forward, for he longed to touch her after that cruel year of separation.  Then he got possession of her hands, felt about the wide sleeves of her dressing jacket, traveled up as far as her shoulders.

“You still love your baby?” he asked in his child voice.

“Oh, I certainly love him!” answered Nana, briskly getting out of his clutches.  “But you come popping in without warning.  You know, my little man, I’m not my own mistress; you must be good!”

Georges, when he got out of his cab, had been so dizzy with the feeling that his long desire was at last about to be satisfied that he had not even noticed what sort of house he was entering.  But now he became conscious of a change in the things around him.  He examined the sumptuous dining room with its lofty decorated ceiling, its Gobelin hangings, its buffet blazing with plate.

“Yes, yes!” he remarked sadly.

And with that she made him understand that he was never to come in the mornings but between four and six in the afternoon, if he cared to.  That was her reception time.  Then as he looked at her with suppliant, questioning eyes and craved no boon at all, she, in her turn, kissed him on the forehead in the most amiable way.

“Be very good,” she whispered.  “I’ll do all I can.”

But the truth was that this remark now meant nothing.  She thought Georges very nice and would have liked him as a companion, but as nothing else.  Nevertheless, when he arrived daily at four o’clock he seemed so wretched that she was often fain to be as compliant as of old and would hide him in cupboards and constantly allow him to pick up the crumbs from Beauty’s table.  He hardly ever left the house now and became as much one of its inmates as the little dog Bijou.  Together they nestled among Mistress’s skirts and enjoyed a little of her at a time, even when she was with another man, while doles of sugar and stray caresses not seldom fell to their share in her hours of loneliness and boredom.