"You think not?" asked the doctor.

"I know my religion better than you, that's certain!"

A lugubrious bell sounded, and the mournful voice of the call-boy was
heard in the corridors:

"The curtain-raiser is over!"

Nanteuil rose, and slipped over her wrist a velvet ribbon ornamented
with a steel medallion. Madame Michon was on her knees arranging the
three Watteau pleats of the pink dress, and, with her mouth full of
pins, delivered herself from one corner of her lips of the following
maxim:

"There is one good thing in being old, men cannot make you suffer any
more."

Robert de Ligny took a cigarette from his case.

"May I?" And he moved toward the lighted candle on the dressing-table.

Nanteuil, who never took her eyes off him, saw beneath his moustache,
red and light as flame, his lips, ruddy in the candlelight, drawing in
and puffing out the smoke. She felt a slight warmth in her ears.
Pretending to look among her trinkets, she grazed Ligny's neck with her
lips, and whispered to him:

"Wait for me after the show, in a cab, at the corner of the Rue de
Tournon."

At this moment the sound of voices and footsteps was heard in the
corridor. The actors in the curtain-raiser were returning to their
dressing-rooms.

"Doctor, pass me your newspaper."

"It is highly uninteresting, mademoiselle."

"Never mind, pass it over."

She took it and held it like a screen above her head.

"The light makes my eyes ache," she observed.

It was true that a too brilliant light would sometimes give her a
headache. But she had just seen herself in the glass. With her
blue-tinted eyelids, her eyelashes smeared with a black paste, her
grease-painted cheeks, her lips tinted red in the shape of a tiny heart,
it seemed to her she looked like a painted corpse with glass eyes, and
she did not wish Ligny to see her thus.

While she was keeping her face in the shadow of the newspaper a tall,
lean young man entered the dressing-room with a swaggering gait. His
melancholy eyes were deeply sunken above a nose like a crow's beak; his
mouth was set in a petrified grin. The Adam's apple of his long throat
made a deep shadow on his stock. He was dressed as a stage bailiff.

"That you, Chevalier? How are you, my friend?" gaily inquired Dr.
Trublet, who was fond of actors, preferred the bad ones, and had a
special liking for Chevalier.

"Come in, everybody!" cried Nanteuil "This isn't a dressing-room; it's a
mill."

"My respects,