"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.

It was true that a too brilliant light would sometimes give her a
headache. But she had just seen herself in the glass. With her
blue-tinted eyelids, her eyelashes smeared with a black paste, her
grease-painted cheeks, her lips tinted red in the shape of a tiny heart,
it seemed to her she looked like a painted corpse with glass eyes, and
she did not wish Ligny to see her thus.

While she was keeping her face in the shadow of the newspaper a tall,
lean young man entered the dressing-room with a swaggering gait. His
melancholy eyes were deeply sunken above a nose like a crow's beak; his
mouth was set in a petrified grin. The Adam's apple of his long throat
made a deep shadow on his stock. He was dressed as a stage bailiff.

"That you, Chevalier? How are you, my friend?" gaily inquired Dr.
Trublet, who was fond of actors, preferred the bad ones, and had a
special liking for Chevalier.

"Come in, everybody!" cried Nanteuil "This isn't a dressing-room; it's a
mill."

"My respects, none the less, Mme. Miller!" replied Chevalier, "I warn
you, there's a pack of idiots out in front. Would you believe it--they