"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."