overwhelming task.

"Well, let's go on," said Bordenave at last. He spoke in his usual voice
and was perfectly calm.

"Yes, let's go on," Fauchery repeated. "We'll arrange the scene
tomorrow."

And with that they dragged on again and rehearsed their parts with
as much listlessness and as fine an indifference as ever. During the
dispute between manager and author Fontan and the rest had been taking
things very comfortably on the rustic bench and seats at the back of
the stage, where they had been chuckling, grumbling and saying fiercely
cutting things. But when Simonne came back, still smarting from her blow
and choking with sobs, they grew melodramatic and declared that had they
been in her place they would have strangled the swine. She began wiping
her eyes and nodding approval. It was all over between them, she said.
She was leaving him, especially as Steiner had offered to give her a
grand start in life only the day before. Clarisse was much astonished at
this, for the banker was quite ruined, but Prulliere began laughing and
reminded them of the neat manner in which that confounded Israelite had
puffed himself alongside of Rose in order to get his Landes saltworks
afloat on 'change. Just at that time he was airing a new project,
namely, a tunnel under the Bosporus. Simonne listened with the greatest
interest to this fresh piece of information.

As to Clarisse, she had been raging for a week past. Just fancy,
that beast La Faloise, whom she had succeeded in chucking into Gaga's
venerable embrace, was coming into the fortune of a very rich uncle! It
was just her luck; she had always been destined to make things cozy for
other people. Then, too, that pig Bordenave had once more given her a
mere scrap of a part, a paltry fifty lines, just as if she could not
have played Geraldine! She was yearning for that role and hoping that
Nana would refuse it.

"Well, and what about me?" said Prulliere with much bitterness. "I
haven't got more than two hundred lines. I wanted to give the part
up. It's too bad to make me play that fellow Saint-Firmin; why, it's a
regular failure! And then what a style it's written in, my dears! It'll
fall dead flat, you may be sure."

But just then Simonne, who had been chatting with Father Barillot, came
back breathless and announced:

"By the by, talking of Nana, she's in the house."

"Where, where?" asked Clarisse briskly, getting up to look for her.

The news spread at once, and every