The course was about to be cleared.  Labordette hurried Nana but retraced his steps in order to show her a little man talking with Vandeuvres at some distance from the rest.

“Dear me, there’s Price!” he said.

“Ah yes, the man who’s mounting me,” she murmured laughingly.

And she declared him to be exquisitely ugly.  All jockeys struck her as looking idiotic, doubtless, she said, because they were prevented from growing bigger.  This particular jockey was a man of forty, and with his long, thin, deeply furrowed, hard, dead countenance, he looked like an old shriveled-up child.  His body was knotty and so reduced in size that his blue jacket with its white sleeves looked as if it had been thrown over a lay figure.

“No,” she resumed as she walked away, “he would never make me very happy, you know.”

A mob of people were still crowding the course, the turf of which had been wet and trampled on till it had grown black.  In front of the two telegraphs, which hung very high up on their cast-iron pillars, the crowd were jostling together with upturned faces, uproariously greeting the numbers of the different horses as an electric wire in connection with the weighing room made them appear.  Gentlemen were pointing at programs:  Pichenette had been scratched by his owner, and this caused some noise.  However, Nana did not do more than cross over the course on Labordette’s arm.  The bell hanging on the flagstaff was ringing persistently to warn people to leave the course.

“Ah, my little dears,” she said as she got up into her landau again, “their enclosure’s all humbug!”

She was welcomed with acclamation; people around her clapped their hands.

“Bravo, Nana!  Nana’s ours again!”

What idiots they were, to be sure!  Did they think she was the sort to cut old friends?  She had come back just at the auspicious moment.  Now then, ’tenshun!  The race was beginning!  And the champagne was accordingly forgotten, and everyone left off drinking.

But Nana was astonished to find Gaga in her carriage, sitting with Bijou and Louiset on her knees.  Gaga had indeed decided on this course of action in order to be near La Faloise, but she told Nana that she had been anxious to kiss Baby.  She adored children.

“By the by, what about Lili?” asked Nana.  “That’s certainly she over there in that old fellow’s brougham.  They’ve just told me something very nice!”

Gaga had adopted a lachrymose expression.

“My dear, it’s made me ill,” she said dolorously.  “Yesterday I had to keep my bed, I cried so, and today I didn’t think I should be able to come.  You know what my opinions were, don’t you?  I didn’t desire that kind of thing at all.  I had her educated in a convent with a view to a good marriage.  And then to think of the strict advice she had and the constant watching!  Well, my dear, it was she who wished it.  We had such a scene—­tears—­disagreeable