adorned with golden stars with the tips of her long,
thin fingers, began to turn around slowly as if dancing
a waltz, her head swaying from one side to the other.
"Good Virgin!" I repeated in a rather irritated voice, "why don't you speak to me!"
She stopped, posted herself in front of me, stripped off her plaster garments one after another, and entirely nude, lustful and magnificent, her bosom shook with clear, sonorous, precipitous laughter:
"Monsieur Mintie," she said, "I am at home every day from five to seven. And I'll give you Charles' old trousers." And she threw her otter skin bonnet at me.
I sat up on my bed. . . . With a stupid gaze and breathing with difficulty, I looked about me. But the room was quiet, the lamp continued to burn sadly and my open book was lying on the carpet.
The next morning I got up late, having slept badly, pursued by the thought of Juliette in my sleep disturbed by nightmares. During the remainder of that troubled, feverish night she did not leave me for an instant, assuming the most extravagant forms, abandoning herself to the most wretched pranks, and lo! I again beheld her in the morning, and this time she was the same as when I met her before at Lirat's, with her air of modesty, her discreet and charming manners.
I felt a kind of sadness not exactly sadness, but regret, the regret one feels at the sight of a rose-bush whose roses have wilted and whose petals are scattered over the muddy ground. For I could not think of Juliette without thinking at the same time of Lirat's malignant words: "There was also an affair with a wrestler of Neuilly whom she gave twenty francs." What a pity! . . . When she entered the studio I could swear that she was the most virtuous of women. . . . Her very manner of walking, greeting,
