early days after his return from the country she used to drive him wild with delight, as with pussycat caresses she kissed him all round his face and whiskers and vowed that he was her own dear pet and the only little man she adored.  He was no longer afraid of Georges, whom his mother kept down at Les Fondettes.  There was only fat Steiner to reckon with, and he believed he was really ousting him, but he did not dare provoke an explanation on his score.  He knew he was once more in an extraordinary financial scrape and on the verge of being declared bankrupt on ’change, so much so that he was clinging fiercely to the shareholders in the Landes Salt Pits and striving to sweat a final subscription out of them.  Whenever he met him at Nana’s she would explain reasonably enough that she did not wish to turn him out of doors like a dog after all he had spent on her.  Besides, for the last three months he had been living in such a whirl of sensual excitement that, beyond the need of possessing her, he had felt no very distinct impressions.  His was a tardy awakening of the fleshly instinct, a childish greed of enjoyment, which left no room for either vanity or jealousy.  Only one definite feeling could affect him now, and that was Nana’s decreasing kindness.  She no longer kissed him on the beard!  It made him anxious, and as became a man quite ignorant of womankind, he began asking himself what possible cause of offense he could have given her.  Besides, he was under the impression that he was satisfying all her desires.  And so he harked back again and again to the letter he had received that morning with its tissue of falsehoods, invented for the extremely simple purpose of passing an evening at her own theater.  The crowd had pushed him forward again, and he had crossed the passage and was puzzling his brain in front of the entrance to a restaurant, his eyes fixed on some plucked larks and on a huge salmon laid out inside the window.

At length he seemed to tear himself away from this spectacle.  He shook himself, looked up and noticed that it was close on nine o’clock.  Nana would soon be coming out, and he would make her tell the truth.  And with that he walked on and recalled to memory the evenings he once passed in that region in the days when he used to meet her at the door of the theater.

He knew all the shops, and in the gas-laden air he recognized their different scents, such, for instance, as the strong savor of Russia leather, the perfume of vanilla emanating from a chocolate dealer’s basement, the savor of musk blown in whiffs from the open doors of the perfumers.  But he did not dare linger under the gaze of the pale shopwomen, who looked placidly at him as though they knew him by sight.  For one instant he seemed to be studying the line of little round windows above the shops, as though he had never noticed them before among the medley of signs.  Then once again he went up to the boulevard and stood still a minute or two.  A fine rain was