They had to go on foot as far as the Boulevard. The sun was already warming the streets and the glorious May morning seemed to be smiling on the pavements. There was not a cloud in the sky; all was gay in the blue air, transparent as crystal. An involuntary smile played about Denise's lips; she breathed freely; it seemed to her that her bosom was throwing off a stifling fit of six months duration. At last she no longer felt the stuffy air and the heavy stones of The Ladies' Paradise weighing her down! She had the prospect of a long day in the country before her! and it was like a new lease of life, an infinite delight, into which she entered with all the glee of a little child. However, when they were in the cab, she turned her eyes away, feeling ill at ease as Pauline bent over to kiss her lover. "Oh, look!" said she, her head still at the window, "there's Monsieur Lhomme. How he does walk!" "He's got his French horn," added Pauline, leaning out. "What an old fool he is! One would think he was running off to meet his girl!" Lhomme, with his nose in the air, and his instrument under his arm, was spinning along past the Gymnase Theatre, laughing with delight at the thought of the treat in store for him. He was about to spend the day with a friend, a flautist at a petty theatre, in whose rooms a few amateurs indulged in a little chamber-music on Sundays as soon as breakfast was over. "At eight o'clock! what a madman!" resumed Pauline. "And you know that Madame Aurélie and her clique must have taken the Rambouillet train that left at half-past six. It's very certain the husband and wife won't come across each other to-day." Both then began talking of the Rambouillet excursion. They did not wish it to be rainy for the others, because they themselves might suffer as well; still, if a cloud could only burst over there without a drop falling at Joinville, it would be funny all the same. Then they attacked Clara, who hardly knew how to spend the money she made by her vices. Hadn't she bought three pairs of boots all at the same time, and thrown them away the next day, after slashing them with her scissors, on account of her feet, which were covered with corns? In fact, the young ladies were just as bad as the young men, they squandered everything, never saving a sou, but wasting two or three hundred francs a month on dress and dainties. "But he's only got one arm," all of a sudden said Baugé, who had kept his eyes on Lhomme. "How does he manage to play the French horn?" Pauline, who sometimes amused herself by playing on her lover's stupidity, thereupon told him that the cashier kept the instrument up by leaning it against a wall. He thoroughly believed her, and thought it very ingenious. And when, stricken with remorse, she explained to him that Lhomme had adapted to his stump a system of claws which he made use of as fingers, he shook his head, full of doubt and declaring that they wouldn't make him swallow that.