There was an array of fancy articles in the room--a
battered, soiled and well-worn array of chipped basins, of toothless
combs, of all those manifold untidy trifles which, in their hurry and
carelessness, two women will leave scattered about when they undress and
wash together amid purely temporary surroundings, the dirty aspect of
which has ceased to concern them.
"Do come here," Fauchery repeated with the good-humored familiarity
which men adopt among their fallen sisters. "Clarisse is wanting to kiss
you."
Muffat entered the room at last. But what was his surprise when he found
the Marquis de Chouard snugly enscounced on a chair between the two
dressing tables! The marquis had withdrawn thither some time ago. He
was spreading his feet apart because a pail was leaking and letting a
whitish flood spread over the floor. He was visibly much at his ease, as
became a man who knew all the snug corners, and had grown quite merry in
the close dressing room, where people might have been bathing, and amid
those quietly immodest feminine surroundings which the uncleanness of
the little place rendered at once natural and poignant.
"D'you go with the old boy?" Simonne asked Clarisse in a whisper.
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