“So it was you, little bird, who were trotting up and downstairs at daybreak, and making such a noise? You woke me so completely that I could not get to sleep again. You must be very quiet, very good, and learn to play without making a sound. Your cousin does not like noise.”
“And you must take care about your feet,” said Rogron. “You went into the summerhouse with muddy shoes, and left your footsteps printed on the floor. Your cousin likes everything to be clean. A great girl like you ought to be cleanly. Were you not taught to be clean in Brittany? To be sure, when I went there to buy flax it was dreadful to see what savages they were!—She has a fine appetite at any rate,” said Rogron, turning to his sister; “you might think she had not seen food these three days.”
And so, from the very first, Pierrette felt hurt by her cousins’ remarks, hurt without knowing why. Her frank and upright nature, hitherto left to itself, had never been used to reflect; incapable, therefore, of understanding wherein her cousins were wrong, she was doomed to tardy enlightenment through suffering.
After breakfast, the couple, delighted by Pierrette’s astonishment, and eager to enjoy it, showed her their fine drawing-room, to teach her to respect its splendor. Unmarried people, as a result of their isolation, and prompted by the craving for something to interest them, are led to supply the place of natural affections by artificial affections—the love of dogs, cats, or canary birds, of their servant or their spiritual director. Thus Rogron and Sylvie had an immoderate affection for the house and furniture that had cost them so much. Sylvie had taken to helping Adèle every morning, being of opinion that the woman did not know how to wipe furniture, to brush it, and make it look like new. This cleaning was soon her constant occupation. Thus, far from diminishing in value, the furniture was improved. Then the problem was to use it without wearing it out, without staining it, without scratching the wood or chilling the polish. This idea ere long became an old maid’s monomania. Sylvie kept in a closet woolen rags, wax, varnish, and brushes; she learned to use them as skilfully as a polisher; she had feather brooms and dusters, and she could rub without fear of hurting herself, she was so strong! Her clear, blue eye, as cold and hard as steel, constantly peered under the furniture, and you were more likely to find a tender chord in her heart than a speck of flue under a chair.
After what had passed at Madame Tiphaine’s, Sylvie could not possibly shirk the outlay of three hundred francs. During the first week Sylvie was wholly occupied, and Pierrette constantly amused, by the frocks to be ordered and tried on, the shifts and petticoats to be cut out and made by needlewomen working by the day. Pierrette did not know how to sew.
“She has been nicely brought up!” cried Rogron. “Do you know nothing, child?”
Pierrette, who only knew how to love, answered but by a pretty childish shrug.
“What did you do all day in Brittany?” asked Rogron.
“I played,” she replied guilelessly. “Everybody played with me. Grandmamma and grandpapa—and everybody told me stories. Oh! they were very fond of me.”
“Indeed!” replied Rogron, “and so you lived like a lady.”
Pierrette did not understand this tradesman’s wit. She opened her eyes wide.
“She is as stupid as a wooden stool,” said Sylvie to Mademoiselle Borain, the best workwoman in Provins.
“So young!” said the needlewoman, looking at Pierrette, whose delicate little face looked up at her with a knowing expression.
Pierrette liked the workwoman better than her cousins; she put on pretty airs for them, watched them sewing, said quaint things—the flowers of childhood, such as Rogron and Sylvie had already silenced by fear, for they liked to impress all dependants with a wholesome alarm. The sewing-women were charmed with Pierrette. The outfit, however, was not achieved without some terrible interjections.
“That child will cost us the eyes in our heads!” said Sylvie to Rogron.
“Hold yourself up child, do. The deuce is in it! the clothes are for you, not for me,” said she to Pierrette, when she was being measured or fitted.
“Come, let Mademoiselle Borain do her work; you won’t pay her day’s wages!” she exclaimed, seeing the child ask the head needlewoman to do something for her.
“Mademoiselle,” asked Mademoiselle Borain, “must this seam be backstitched?”
“Yes; make everything strongly; I do not want to have such a piece of work again in a hurry.”
But it was the same with the little cousin as with the house. Pierrette was to be as well dressed as Madame Garceland’s little girl. She had fashionable little boots of bronze kid, like the little Tiphaine girl. She had very fine cotton stockings, stays by the best maker, a frock of blue reps, a pretty cape lined with white silk, all in rivalry with young Madame Julliard’s little girl. And the underclothes were as good as the outside show, Sylvie was so much afraid of the keen and scrutinizing eye of the mothers of children. Pierrette had pretty shifts of fine calico. Mademoiselle Borain said that Madame the Sous-préfète’s little girls
