"Really," she said, sitting down before her dressing-table, "she makes me boil, that old Doulce, with her morality. Does she think people have forgotten her adventures? If so, she is mistaken. Madame Ravaud tells one of them six days out of seven. Everybody knows that she reduced her husband, the musician, to such a state of exhaustion that one night he tumbled into his cornet. As for her lovers, magnificent men, just ask Madame Michon. Why, in less than two years she made mere shadows of them, mere puffs of breath. That's the way she controlled them! And supposing anyone had told her that she was lost to art!" Dr. Trublet extended his two hands, palms outward, towards Nanteuil, as though to stop her. "Do not excite yourself, my child. Madame Doulce is sincere. She used to love men, now she loves God. One loves what one can, as one can, and with what one has. She has become chaste and pious at the fitting age. She is diligent in the practices of her religion: she goes to Mass on Sundays and feast days, she----" "Well, she is right to go to Mass," asserted Nanteuil "Michon, light a candle for me, to heat my rouge. I must do my lips again. Certainly, she is quite right to go to Mass, but religion does not forbid one to have a lover." "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.