Two girls were making very merry, showing each other their
birthmarks. One of them, a very young girl, almost a child, had drawn
her skirts up over her knees in order to sew up a rent in her drawers,
and the dressers, catching sight of the two men, drew some curtains half
to for decency's sake. The wild stampede which follows the end of a
play had already begun, the grand removal of white paint and rouge, the
reassumption amid clouds of rice powder of ordinary attire. The strange
animal scent came in whiffs of redoubled intensity through the lines
of banging doors. On the third story Muffat abandoned himself to the
feeling of intoxication which was overpowering him. For the chorus
girls' dressing room was there, and you saw a crowd of twenty women
and a wild display of soaps and flasks of lavender water. The place
resembled the common room in a slum lodging house. As he passed by he
heard fierce sounds of washing behind a closed door and a perfect storm
raging in a washhand basin. And as he was mounting up to the topmost
story of all, curiosity led him to risk one more little peep through
an open loophole. The room was empty, and under the flare of the gas a
solitary chamber pot stood forgotten among a heap of petticoats trailing
on the floor.
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