all the
blasts of heat, had found their goal there. The yellow ceiling looked
as if it had been baked, and a lamp burned amid fumes of russet-colored
fog. For some seconds he leaned upon the iron balustrade which felt warm
and damp and well-nigh human to the touch. And he shut his eyes and drew
a long breath and drank in the sexual atmosphere of the place. Hitherto
he had been utterly ignorant of it, but now it beat full in his face.

"Do come here," shouted Fauchery, who had vanished some moments ago.
"You're being asked for."

At the end of the corridor was the dressing room belonging to Clarisse
and Simonne. It was a long, ill-built room under the roof with a garret
ceiling and sloping walls. The light penetrated to it from two deep-set
openings high up in the wall, but at that hour of the night the dressing
room was lit by flaring gas. It was papered with a paper at seven sous a
roll with a pattern of roses twining over green trelliswork. Two boards,
placed near one another and covered with oilcloth, did duty for dressing
tables. They were black with spilled water, and underneath them was
a fine medley of dinted zinc jugs, slop pails and coarse yellow
earthenware crocks. There was an array of fancy articles in the room--a
battered, soiled and well-worn array of chipped basins, of toothless
combs, of all those manifold untidy trifles which, in their hurry and
carelessness, two women will leave scattered about when they undress and
wash together amid purely temporary surroundings, the dirty aspect of
which has ceased to concern them.

"Do come here," Fauchery repeated with the good-humored familiarity
which men adopt among their fallen sisters. "Clarisse is wanting to kiss
you."

Muffat entered the room at last. But what was his surprise when he found
the Marquis de Chouard snugly enscounced on a chair between the two
dressing tables! The marquis had withdrawn thither some time ago. He
was spreading his feet apart because a pail was leaking and letting a
whitish flood spread over the floor. He was visibly much at his ease, as
became a man who knew all the snug corners, and had grown quite merry in
the close dressing room, where people might have been bathing, and amid
those quietly immodest feminine surroundings which the uncleanness of
the little place rendered at once natural and poignant.

"D'you go with the old boy?" Simonne asked Clarisse in a whisper.

"Rather!" replied the latter aloud.

The dresser, a