ly, darling."

When they were in the street she resumed, in that low and mysterious
tone in which confidences are made: "I dared not ask you this until now,
but you cannot imagine how I love these escapades in places ladies do
not go to. During the carnival I will dress up as a schoolboy. I make
such a capital boy."

When they entered the ball-room she clung close to him, gazing with
delighted eyes on the girls and the bullies, and from time to time, as
though to reassure herself as regards any possible danger, saying, as
she noticed some serious and motionless municipal guard: "That is a
strong-looking fellow." In a quarter of an hour she had had enough of it
and he escorted her home.

Then began quite a series of excursions in all the queer places where
the common people amuse themselves, and Duroy discovered in his mistress
quite a liking for this vagabondage of students bent on a spree. She
came to their meeting-place in a cotton frock and with a servant's
cap--a theatrical servant's cap--on her head; and despite the elegant
and studied simplicity of her toilet, retained her rings, her bracelets,
and her diamond earrings, saying, when he begged her to remove them:
"Bah! they will think they are paste."

She thought she was admirably disguised, and although she was really
only concealed after the fashion of an ostrich, she went into the most
ill-famed drinking places. She wanted Duroy to dress himself like a
workman, but he resisted, and retained his correct attire, without even
consenting to exchange his tall hat for one of soft felt. She was
consoled for this obstinacy on his part by the reflection that she would
be taken for a chambermaid engaged in a love affair with a gentleman,
and thought this delightful. In this guise they went into popular
wine-shops, and sat down on rickety chairs at old wooden tables in
smoke-filled rooms. A cloud of strong tobacco smoke, with which still
blended the smell of fish fried at dinner time, filled the room; men in
blouses shouted at one another as they tossed off nips of spirits; and
the astonished waiter would stare at this strange couple as he placed
before them two cherry brandies. She--trembling, fearsome, yet
charmed--began to sip the red liquid, looking round her with uneasy and
kindling eye. Each cherry swallowed gave her the sensation of a sin
committed, each drop of burning liquor flowing down her throat gave her

the pleasure of a naughty and forbidden joy.

Th