We should be as
jolly as grigs together, eh?"
This was no empty suggestion. Seized with a desire to astonish Paris, he
had been slyly projecting this marriage. "Nana's husband! Wouldn't that
sound smart, eh?" Rather a stunning apotheosis that! But Nana gave him a
fine snubbing.
"Me marry you! Lovely! If such an idea had been tormenting me I should
have found a husband a long time ago! And he'd have been a man worth
twenty of you, my pippin! I've had a heap of proposals. Why, look here,
just reckon 'em up with me: Philippe, Georges, Foucarmont, Steiner--that
makes four, without counting the others you don't know. It's a chorus
they all sing. I can't be nice, but they forthwith begin yelling, 'Will
you marry me? Will you marry me?'"
She lashed herself up and then burst out in fine indignation:
"Oh dear, no! I don't want to! D'you think I'm built that way? Just look
at me a bit! Why, I shouldn't be Nana any longer if I fastened a man on
behind! And, besides, it's too foul!"
And she spat and hiccuped with disgust, as though she had seen all the
dirt in the world spread out beneath her.
One evening La Faloise vanished, and a week later it became known that
he was in the country with an uncle whose mania was botany.
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