y the sweet melancholy
of the summer twilight, by the torpidity of the hour, and by the
prospect of the next day, which was her day off. The liveried
functionaries ignored her, probably scorned her as a mere pretty little
morsel. Nevertheless, she was the centre of energy, not they. If money
were payable, she was the person to receive it; if a customer wanted a
room, she would choose it; and the lords had to call her 'miss.' The
immense and splendid hotel pulsed round this simple heart hidden under a
white blouse. Especially in summer, her presence and the presence of
her companions in the bureau (but to-night she was alone) ministered to
the satisfaction of male guests, whose cruel but profoundly human
instincts found pleasure in the fact that, no matter when they came in
from their wanderings, the pretty captives were always there in the
bureau, smiling welcome, puzzling stupid little brains and puckering
pale brows over enormous ledgers, twittering borrowed facetiousness from
rosy mouths, and smoothing out seductive toilettes with long thin hands
that were made for ring and bracelet and rudder-lines, and not a bit for
the pen and the ruler.

The pretty little thing despised of the functionaries corresponded
almost exactly in appearance to the typical bureau girl. She was
moderately tall; she had a good slim figure, all pleasant curves, flaxen
hair and plenty of it, and a dainty, rather expressionless face; the
ears and mouth were very small, the eyes large and blue, the nose so-so,
the cheeks and forehead of an equal ivory pallor, the chin trifling,
with a crease under the lower lip and a rich convexity springing out
from below the crease. The extremities of the full lips were nearly
always drawn up in a smile, mechanical, but infallibly attractive. The
hair was of an orthodox frizziness. You would have said she was a nice,
kind, good-natured girl, flirtatious but correct, well adapted to adorn
a dogcart on Sundays.

This was Nina, foolish Nina, aged twenty-one. In her reverie the entire
Hotel Majestic weighed on her; she had a more than adequate sense of her
own solitary importance in the bureau, and stirring obscurely beneath
that consciousness were the deep ineradicable longings of a poor pretty
girl for heaps of money, endless luxury of finery and chocolates, and
sentimental silken dalliance.

Suddenly a stranger entered the hall. His advent seemed to wake the
place out of the trance into which it had fallen.