High up above him there was a clicking of ewers and basins, a sound of laughter and of people calling to one another, a banging of doors, which in their continual opening and shutting allowed an odor of womankind to escape--a musky scent of oils and essences mingling with the natural pungency exhaled from human tresses.

He did not stop.

Nay, he hastened his walk: he almost ran, his skin tingling with the breath of that fiery approach to a world he knew nothing of.
"A theater's a curious sight, eh ?" said the Marquis de Chouard with the enchanted expression of a man who once more finds himself amid familiar surroundings.
But Bordenave had at length reached Nana's dressing room at the end of the passage.

He quietly turned the door handle; then, cringing again: "If His Highness will have the goodness to enter--" They heard the cry of a startled woman and caught sight of Nana as, stripped to the waist, she slipped behind a curtain while her dresser, who had been in the act of drying her, stood, towel in air, before them.
"Oh, it IS silly to come in that way!" cried Nana from her hiding place.
"Don't come in; you see you mustn't come in!" Bordenave did not seem to relish this sudden flight.
"Do stay where you were, my dear.

Why, it doesn't matter," he said.
"It's His Highness.