We have to call at Brisbille’s, my aunt and I, before Church.  We are forced to tolerate him thus, so as to get our twisted key put right.  I wait for Mame in the court, sitting on a tub by the shop, which is lifeless to-day, and full of the scattered leavings of toil.  Mame is never ready in time.  She has twice appeared on the threshold in her fine black dress and velvet cape; then, having forgotten something, she has gone back very quickly, like a mole.  Finally, she must needs go up to my room, to cast a last glance over it.

At last we are off, side by side.  She takes my arm proudly.  From time to time she looks at me, and I at her, and her smile is an affectionate grimace amid the sunshine.

When we have gone a little way, my aunt stops, “You go on,” she says; “I’ll catch you up.”

She has gone up to Apolline, the street-sweeper.  The good woman, as broad as she is long, was gaping on the edge of the causeway, her two parallel arms feebly rowing in the air, an exile in the Sabbath idleness, and awkwardly conscious of her absent broom.

Mame brings her along, and looking back as I walk, I hear her talking of me, hastily, as one who confides a choking secret, while Apolline follows, with her arms swinging far from her body, limping and outspread like a crab.

Says Mame, “That boy’s bedroom is untidy.  And then, too, he uses too many shirt-collars, and he doesn’t know how to blow his nose.  He stuffs handkerchiefs into his pockets, and you find them again like stones.”

“All the same, he’s a good young man,” stammers the waddling street cleanser, brandishing her broom-bereaved hands at random, and shaking over her swollen and many-storied boots a skirt weighted round the hem by a coat-of-mail of dry mud.

These confidences with which Mame is in the habit of breaking forth before no matter whom get on my nerves.  I call her with some impatience.  She starts at the command, comes up, and throws me a martyr’s glance.

She proceeds with her nose lowered under her black hat with green foliage, hurt that I should thus have summoned her before everybody, and profoundly irritated.  So a persevering malice awakens again in the depths of her, and she mutters, very low, “You spat on the window the other day!”

But she cannot resist hooking herself again on to another interlocutor, whose Sunday trousers are planted on the causeway, like two posts, and his blouse as stiff as a lump of iron ore.  I leave them, and go alone into Brisbille’s.

The smithy hearth befires a workshop which bristles with black objects.  In the middle of the dark bodies of implements hanging from walls and ceiling is the metallic Brisbille, with leaden hands, his dark apron rainbowed with file-dust,—­dirty on principle, because of his ideas, this being Sunday.  He is sober, and his face still unkindled, but he is waiting impatiently for the church-going bell to begin, so that he may go and drink, in complete solitude.