And it was a fact that you never knew a man. Look at the case of Eleanor Dupont, who lived for ten years with Duchamp of the Sorbonne. … Eleanor would never attend scrupulously to her attire because her man wore blue spectacles and was a savant. … But what happened. … There came along a little piece with a hat as large as cartwheel covered with green-stuff and sleeves up above her ears—as the mode was then. …
That had been a lesson to her, Marie Léonie, who had been a girl at the time. She had determined that if she achieved a collage sérieux with a monsieur of eighty and as blind as a bat she would study the modes of the day right down to the latest perfume. These messieurs did not know it, but they moved among femmes du monde and the fashionable cocottes, and however much she at home might be the little brown bird of the domestic hearth, the lines of her dresses, her hair, her personal odour, must conform. Mark did not imagine; she did not suppose he had ever seen a fashionable journal in her apartments that were open to him, or had ever suspected that she walked in the Row on a Sunday when he was away. … But she had studied these things like another. And more. For it is difficult to keep with the fashion and at the same time appear as if you were a serious petite bourgeoise. But she had done it; and observe the results. …
But that poor Valentine. … Her man was attached enough: and well he ought to be, considering the affair in which he had landed her. But always there comes the pic des tempêtes, the Cap Horn, round which you must go. It is the day when your man looks at you and says: “H’m, h’m,” and considers if the candle is not more valuable than the game! Ah, then. … There are wise folk who put that at the seventh year; other wise ones, at the second; others again, at the eleventh. … But in fact you may put it at any day on any year—to the hundredth. … And that poor Valentine with four spots of oil on her only skirt but two. And that so badly hung, though the stuff no doubt was once good. One must concede that! They make admirable tweeds in this country: better certainly than in Roubaix. But is that enough to save a country—or a woman dependent on a man who has introduced her into a bad affair?
A voice behind her said:
“I see you have plenty of eggs!”—an unusual voice of a sort of breathless nervousness. Marie Léonie continued to hold the mouth of her tube into the neck of a burgundy bottle; into this she had already introduced a small screw of sifted sugar and an extremely minute portion of a powder that she got from a pharmacist of Rouen. This, she understood, made the cider of a rich brownness. She did not see why cider should be brown, but it was considered to be less fortifying if it were light golden. She continued also to think about Valentine, who would be twittering with nerves at the window whose iron-leaded casement was open above their heads. She would have put down her Latin book and have crept to the window to listen.
The little girl beside Marie Léonie had risen from the three-legged stool and held a dead, white fowl with a nearly naked breast by its neck. She said hoarsely:
“These ’ere be ’er Ladyship’s settins of prize Reds.” She was blonde, red-faced and wore on her dull fair hair a rather large cap, on her thin body a check blue cotton gown. “Arf a crownd a piece the heggs be or twenty-four shillings a dozen if you takes a gross.”
Marie Léonie heard the hoarse voice with some satisfaction. This girl whom they had only had for a fortnight seemed to be satisfactory mentally; it was not her business to sell the eggs but Gunning’s; nevertheless she knew the details. She did not turn round: it was not her business to talk to anyone who wanted to buy eggs and she had no curiosity as to customers. She had too much else to think about. The voice said:
“Half a crown seems a great deal for an egg. What is that in dollars? This must be that tyranny over edibles by the producer of which one has heard so much.”
“Tiddn nothin’ in dollars,” the girl said. “Arf a dollar is two bob. Arf a crownd is two ’n’ six.”
The conversation continued, but it grew dim in Marie Léonie’s thoughts. The child and the voice disputed as to what a dollar was—or so it appeared, for Marie Léonie was not familiar with either of the accents of the disputants. The child was a combative child. She drove both Gunning and the cabinetmaker Cramp with an organ of brass. Of tin perhaps, like a penny whistle. When she was not grubbily working she read books with avidity—books about Blood if she could get them. She had an exaggerated respect for the Family, but none for any other soul in the world. …
Marie Léonie considered that, by now, she might have got down to the depth of the cask where you find sediment. She ran some cider into a clear glass, stopping the tube with her thumb. The cider was clear enough to let her bottle another dozen, she judged; then she would send for Gunning to take the spile-bung out of the next cask. Four sixty-gallon casks she had to attend to; two of them were done. She began to tire: she was not unfatiguable if she was indefatigable. She began at any rate to feel drowsy. She wished Valentine could have helped her. But that girl had not much backbone, and she, Marie Léonie, acknowledged
