Immediately after the coffee my pretty hostess, passing my chair, with a quick motion in going out made me a slight gesture.  I followed her into a small office or ante-chamber adjoining.  The furniture was very simple; the indicator, with a figure for every bell, decorated the wall in its cherry-wood frame; the keys, hanging aslant in rows, like points of interrogation in a letter of Sevigne’s, formed a corresponding ornament; and a row of registers on the desk completed the furniture.  One of these books she drew forward, opened and presented for my signature, still flashing over my face that intent but benevolent glance.

“Monsieur, have the goodness to inscribe your name, the place you came from, and that of your destination.”

I took the pen, and, with the air of complying exactly and courteously with her demand, folded the quill into three or four lengths, and placed it weltering in ink within my waistcoat pocket.  I was looking intently into my hostess’s face.

I think no American can observe without peculiar complacency the neat artisanne’s cap on the brows of a respectable young Frenchwoman.  This cap is made of some opaque white substance, tender yet solid, and the theory of its existence is that it should be stainless and incapable of disturbance.  It is the badge of an order, the sign of unpretending industry.  The personage who wears it does not propose to look like a “dame:”  she contentedly crowns herself with the tiara of her rank.  Long generations of unaspiring humility have bequeathed her this soft and candid sign of distinction:  as her turn comes in the line of inheritance she spends her life in keeping unsullied its difficult purity, and she will leave to her daughters the critical task of its equipoise.  If she soils or rumples or tears it, she descends in her little scale of dignities and becomes an ouvriere.  If she loses it, she is unclassed entirely, and enters the half-world.  The porter’s wife with her dubious mob-cap, and the hard, flaunting grisette with her melancholy feathers and determined chapeau, are equally removed from the white cap of the “young person.”  To maintain it in its vestal candor and proud sincerity is not always an easy task in a land where every careless student and idle nobleman is eager to tumble it with his fingers or to pin among its frills the blossom named love-in-idleness:  Mimi Pinson has to wear her cap very close to her wise little head.  To herself and to those among whom she moves nothing perhaps seems more natural than the successful carriage of this white emblem, triumphantly borne from age to age above the dust of labor and in the face of all kinds of temptation; but to the republican from beyond the seas it is a kind of sacred relic.  The Yankee who knows only the forlorn aureoles of wire and greased gauze surrounding the sainted heads of Lowell factory-girls, and the frowsy ones of New York bookbinders, is struck by the artisanne cap as by something exquisitely fresh, proud and truthful.