She, Valérie, talked much and fast as they went back to the rue de Varennes, but she did not tell why she had changed her mind so suddenly.
The court of the old hôtel seemed more than usually boring and solemn to Nanette, and also the dim grave stairway. She would rather have had tea in the salon of the peacock tapestries, but Valérie told the old man-servant to bring it up to her little sitting-room.
She went in at her own door ahead of Nanette, and looked about her as if for something she expected to find in the room. She seemed so odd that Nanette just stood back against the door watching her.
After quite a minute Valérie turned to her and said, "Tell me, does it not seem to you that there is smoke in the room?"
The room was full of the afternoon July sunshine. The window that gave on to the garden was open. There were some arum lilies in a vase, and their fragrance was heavy in the sunshine.
"Why, no," said Nanette, "there is no smoke here."
Valérie began moving about the room aimlessly. As she moved here and there she was taking off her long suède gloves that Nanette admired.
"It is very queer," she said, never looking at Nanette, "but for days, three days, it has seemed to me all the time that my room was full of smoke. I see it and smell it. At first I thought something must be burning somewhere. But there was nothing. Besides, it is not that sort of smoke. It is the smoke of gunpowder."
She had thrown her gloves down on a chair, and was taking off her hat. She pulled the pins out of it, one after the other, and took it off, and thrust the pins back into it. "It is quite different from other smoke," she said, "there is no doubting what it is."