Twelve struck. The public would have to wait more than three hours
for the Grand Prix to be run. When the landau had drawn up beside the
barriers Nana settled herself comfortably down as though she were in her
own house. A whim had prompted her to bring Bijou and Louiset with her,
and the dog crouched among her skirts, shivering with cold despite
the heat of the day, while amid a bedizenment of ribbons and laces the
child's poor little face looked waxen and dumb and white in the open
air. Meanwhile the young woman, without troubling about the people near
her, talked at the top of her voice with Georges and Philippe Hugon, who
were seated opposite on the front seat among such a mountain of bouquets
of white roses and blue myosotis that they were buried up to their
shoulders.
"Well then," she was saying, "as he bored me to death, I showed him the
door. And now it's two days that he's been sulking."
She was talking of Muffat, but she took care not to confess to the young
men the real reason for this first quarrel, which was that one evening
he had found a man's hat in her bedroom. She had indeed brought home a
passer-by out of sheer ennui--a silly infatuation.
"You have no idea how funny he is," she continued, growing merry over
the particulars she was giving.
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