It embarrassed him somewhat to hear her talking familiarly about the countess.
But she pressed him further, asking at what time the train was due and wanting to know whether he were going to the station to meet her.

She had begun to walk more slowly than ever, as though the shops interested her very much.
"Now do look!" she said, pausing anew before a jeweler's window, "what a funny bracelet!" She adored the Passage des Panoramas.

The tinsel of the ARTICLE DE PARIS, the false jewelry, the gilded zinc, the cardboard made to look like leather, had been the passion of her early youth.

It remained, and when she passed the shop-windows she could not tear herself away from them.

It was the same with her today as when she was a ragged, slouching child who fell into reveries in front of the chocolate maker's sweet-stuff shows or stood listening to a musical box in a neighboring shop or fell into supreme ecstasies over cheap, vulgarly designed knickknacks, such as nutshell workboxes, ragpickers' baskets for holding toothpicks, Vendome columns and Luxor obelisks on which thermometers were mounted.