Pupasse—­her name was Marie Pupasse but no one thought of calling her anything but Pupasse, with emphasis on the first syllable and sibilance on the last—­had no parents only a grandmother, to describe whom, all that is necessary to say is that she was as short as Pupasse was tall, and that her face resembled nothing so much as a little yellow apple shriveling from decay.  The old lady came but once a week, to fetch Pupasse fresh clothes, and a great brown paper bag of nice things to eat.  There was no boarder in the school who received handsomer bags of cake and fruit than Pupasse.  And although, not two hours before, a girl might have been foremost in the shrill cry, “It is Pupasse who made the noise!  It is Pupasse who made me laugh!” there was nothing in that paper bag reserved even from such a one.  When the girl herself with native delicacy would, under the circumstances, judge it discreet to refuse, Pupasse would plead, “Oh, but take it to give me pleasure!” And if still the refusal continued, Pupasse would take her bag and go into the summer-house in the corner of the garden, and cry until the unforgiving one would relent.  But the first offering of the bag was invariably to the stern dispenser of fools’ caps and the unnamed humiliation of the reversed skirt:  Madame Joubert.

Pupasse was in the fifth class.  The sixth—­the abecedaires—­was the lowest in the school.  Green was the color of the fifth; white—­innocence—­of the abecedaires.  Exhibition after exhibition, the same green sash and green ribbons appeared on Pupasse’s white muslin, the white muslin getting longer and longer every year, trying to keep up with her phenomenal growth; and always, from all over the room, buzzed the audience’s suppressed merriment at Pupasse’s appearance in the ranks of the little ones of nine and ten.  It was that very merriment that brought about the greatest change in the Institute St. Denis.  The sitting order of the classes was reversed.  The first class—­the graduates—­went up to the top step of the estrade; and the little ones put on the lowest, behind the pianos.  The graduates grumbled that it was not comme il faut to have young ladies of their position stepping like camels up and down those great steps; and the little girls said it was a shame to hide them behind the pianos after their mamas had taken so much pains to make them look pretty.  But madame said—­going also to natural history for her comparison—­that one must be a rhinoceros to continue the former routine.

Religion cannot be kept waiting forever on the intelligence.  It was always in the fourth class that the first communion was made; that is, when the girls stayed one year in each class.  But Pupasse had spent three years in the sixth class, and had already been four in the fifth, and Madame Joubert felt that longer delay would be disrespectful to the good Lord.  It was true that Pupasse could not yet distinguish the ten commandments from the seven capital sins, and still would answer that Jeanne d’Arc was the foundress of the “Little Sisters of the Poor.”  But, as Madame Joubert always said in the little address she made to the catechism class every year before handing it over to Father Dolomier, God judged from the heart, and not from the mind.