He liked her to express such excellent views.  Both, indeed, understood one another in political matters.  Vandeuvres and Philippe Hugon likewise indulged in endless jokes against the “cads,” the quarrelsome set who scuttled off the moment they clapped eyes on a bayonet.  But Georges that evening remained pale and somber.

“What can be the matter with that baby?” asked Nana, noticing his troubled appearance.

“With me?  Nothing—­I am listening,” he muttered.

But he was really suffering.  On rising from table he had heard Philippe joking with the young woman, and now it was Philippe, and not himself, who sat beside her.  His heart, he knew not why, swelled to bursting.  He could not bear to see them so close together; such vile thoughts oppressed him that shame mingled with his anguish.  He who laughed at Satin, who had accepted Steiner and Muffat and all the rest, felt outraged and murderous at the thought that Philippe might someday touch that woman.

“Here, take Bijou,” she said to comfort him, and she passed him the little dog which had gone to sleep on her dress.

And with that Georges grew happy again, for with the beast still warm from her lap in his arms, he held, as it were, part of her.

Allusion had been made to a considerable loss which Vandeuvres had last night sustained at the Imperial Club.  Muffat, who did not play, expressed great astonishment, but Vandeuvres smilingly alluded to his imminent ruin, about which Paris was already talking.  The kind of death you chose did not much matter, he averred; the great thing was to die handsomely.  For some time past Nana had noticed that he was nervous and had a sharp downward droop of the mouth and a fitful gleam in the depths of his clear eyes.  But he retained his haughty aristocratic manner and the delicate elegance of his impoverished race, and as yet these strange manifestations were only, so to speak, momentary fits of vertigo overcoming a brain already sapped by play and by debauchery.  One night as he lay beside her he had frightened her with a dreadful story.  He had told her he contemplated shutting himself up in his stable and setting fire to himself and his horses at such time as he should have devoured all his substance.  His only hope at that period was a horse, Lusignan by name, which he was training for the Prix de Paris.  He was living on this horse, which was the sole stay of his shaken credit, and whenever Nana grew exacting he would put her off till June and to the probability of Lusignan’s winning.

“Bah!  He may very likely lose,” she said merrily, “since he’s going to clear them all out at the races.”

By way of reply he contented himself by smiling a thin, mysterious smile.  Then carelessly: 

“By the by, I’ve taken the liberty of giving your name to my outsider, the filly.  Nana, Nana—­that sounds well.  You’re not vexed?”

“Vexed, why?” she said in a state of inward ecstasy.