“Oh, it IS silly to come in that way!” cried Nana from her hiding place. “Don’t come in; you see you mustn’t come in!” Bordenave did not seem to relish this sudden flight. “Do stay where you were, my dear. Why, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s His Highness. Come, come, don’t be childish.” And when she still refused to make her appearance—for she was startled as yet, though she had begun to laugh—he added in peevish, paternal tones: “Good heavens, these gentlemen know perfectly well what a woman looks like. They won’t eat you.” “I’m not so sure of that,” said the prince wittily. With that the whole company began laughing in an exaggerated manner in order to pay him proper court. “An exquisitely witty speech—an altogether Parisian speech,” as Bordenave remarked. Nana vouchsafed no further reply, but the curtain began moving. Doubtless she was making up her mind. Then Count Muffat, with glowing cheeks, began to take stock of the dressing room. It was a square room with a very low ceiling, and it was entirely hung with a light-colored Havana stuff. A curtain of the same material depended from a copper rod and formed a sort of recess at the end of the room, while two large windows opened on the courtyard of the theater and were faced, at a distance of three yards at most, by a leprous-looking wall against which the panes cast squares of yellow light amid the surrounding darkness. A large dressing glass faced a white marble toilet table, which was garnished with a disorderly array of flasks and glass boxes containing oils, essences and powders. The count went up to the dressing glass and discovered that he was looking very flushed and had small drops of perspiration on his forehead. He dropped his eyes and came and took up a position in front of the toilet table, where the basin, full of soapy water, the small, scattered, ivory toilet utensils and the damp sponges, appeared for some moments to absorb his attention. The feeling of dizziness which he had experienced when he first visited Nana in the Boulevard Haussmann once more overcame him. He felt the thick carpet soften under foot, and the gasjets burning by the dressing table and by the glass seemed to shoot whistling flames about his temples. For one moment, being afraid of fainting away under the influence of those feminine odors which he now re-encountered, intensified by the heat under the low-pitched ceiling, he sat down on the edge of a softly padded divan between the two windows. But he got up again almost directly and, returning to the dressing table, seemed to gaze with vacant eyes into space, for he was thinking of a bouquet of tuberoses which had once faded in his bedroom and had nearly killed him in their death. When tuberoses are turning brown they have a human smell. “Make haste!” Bordenave whispered, putting his head in behind the curtain.