She did not care for the grand gay people.

When the band played, and the park filled, and the bright little cafes were thronged with pleasure seekers, and the crowds flocked hither and thither to the woods, to the theatres, to the galleries, to the guinguettes, Bebee, going gravely along with her emptied baskets homeward, envied none of these.

When at Noel the little children hugged their loads of puppets and sugar-plums; when at the Fete Dieu the whole people flocked out be-ribboned and vari-colored like any bed of spring anemones; when in the merry midsummer the chars-a-bancs trundled away into the forest with laughing loads of students and maidens; when in the rough winters the carriages left furred and jewelled women at the doors of the operas or the palaces,—­Bebee, going and coming through the city to her flower stall or lace work, looked at them all, and never thought of envy or desire.

She had her little hut:  she could get her bread; she lived with the flowers; the neighbors were good to her, and now and then, on a saint’s day, she too got her day in the woods; it never occurred to her that her lot could be better.

But sometimes sitting, looking at the dark old beauty of the Broodhuis, or at the wondrous carven fronts of other Spanish houses, or at the painted stories of the cathedral windows, or at the quaint colors of the shipping on the quay, or at the long dark aisles of trees that went away through the forest, where her steps had never wandered,—­sometimes Bebee would get pondering on all this unknown world that lay before and behind and around her, and a sense of her own utter ignorance would steal on her; and she would say to herself, “If only I knew a little—­just a very little!”

But it is not easy to know even a very little when you have to work for your bread from sunrise to nightfall, and when none of your friends know how to read or write, and even your old priest is one of a family of peasants, and can just teach you the alphabet, and that is all.  For Father Francis could do no more than this; and all his spare time was taken up in digging his cabbage plot and seeing to his beehives; and the only books that Bebee ever beheld were a few tattered lives of saints that lay moth-eaten on a shelf of his cottage.

But Brussels has stones that are sermons, or rather that are quaint, touching, illuminated legends of the Middle Ages, which those who run may read.

Brussels is a gay little city that lies as bright within its girdle of woodland as any butterfly that rests upon moss.

The city has its ways and wiles of Paris.  It decks itself with white and gold.  It has music under its trees and soldiers in its streets, and troops marching and countermarching along its sunny avenues.  It has blue and pink, and yellow and green, on its awnings and on its house fronts.  It has a merry open-air life on its pavements at little marble tables before little gay-colored cafes.  It has gilded balconies, and tossing flags, and comic operas, and leisurely pleasure seekers, and tries always to believe and make the world believe that it is Paris in very truth.