A cold, shivering feeling was creeping from his scalp to his
shoulders. This article had been written anyhow. The phrases were wildly
extravagant; the unexpected epigrams and quaint collocations of words
went beyond all bounds. Yet notwithstanding this, he was struck by what
he had read, for it had rudely awakened within him much that for months
past he had not cared to think about.

He looked up. Nana had grown absorbed in her ecstatic
self-contemplation. She was bending her neck and was looking attentively
in the mirror at a little brown mark above her right haunch. She was
touching it with the tip of her finger and by dint of bending backward
was making it stand out more clearly than ever. Situated where it
was, it doubtless struck her as both quaint and pretty. After that she
studied other parts of her body with an amused expression and much of
the vicious curiosity of a child. The sight of herself always astonished
her, and she would look as surprised and ecstatic as a young girl who
has discovered her puberty. Slowly, slowly, she spread out her arms in
order to give full value to her figure, which suggested the torso of
a plump Venus. She bent herself this way and that and examined herself
before and behind, stooping to look at the side view of her bosom and
at the sweeping contours of her thighs. And she ended with a strange
amusement which consisted of swinging to right and left, her knees
apart and her body swaying from the waist with the perpetual jogging,
twitching movements peculiar to an oriental dancer in the danse du
ventre.

Muffat sat looking at her. She frightened him. The newspaper had dropped
from his hand. For a moment he saw her as she was, and he despised
himself. Yes, it was just that; she had corrupted his life; he already
felt himself tainted to his very marrow by impurities hitherto undreamed
of. Everything was now destined to rot within him, and in the twinkling
of an eye he understood what this evil entailed. He saw the ruin brought
about by this kind of "leaven"--himself poisoned, his family destroyed,
a bit of the social fabric cracking and crumbling. And unable to take
his eyes from the sight, he sat looking fixedly at her, striving to
inspire himself with loathing for her nakedness.

Nana no longer moved. With an arm behind her neck, one hand clasped in
the other, and her elbows far apart, she was throwing back her head so
that he could see a foreshortened reflection of her half-close