After the remarks made at Madame Tiphaine’s, Sylvie dared not flinch from the three hundred francs for Pierrette’s clothes.  During the first week her time was wholly taken up, and Pierrette’s too, by frocks to order and try on, chemises and petticoats to cut out and have made by a seamstress who went out by the day.  Pierrette did not know how to sew.

“That’s pretty bringing up!” said Rogron.  “Don’t you know how to do anything, little girl?”

Pierrette, who knew nothing but how to love, made a pretty, childish gesture.

“What did you do in Brittany?” asked Rogron.

“I played,” she answered, naively.  “Everybody played with me.  Grandmamma and grandpapa they told me stories.  Ah! they all loved me!”

“Hey!” said Rogron; “didn’t you take it easy!”

Pierrette opened her eyes wide, not comprehending.

“She is as stupid as an owl,” said Sylvie to Mademoiselle Borain, the best seamstress in Provins.

“She’s so young,” said the workwoman, looking kindly at Pierrette, whose delicate little muzzle was turned up to her with a coaxing look.

Pierrette preferred the sewing-women to her relations.  She was endearing in her ways with them, she watched their work, and made them those pretty speeches that seem like the flowers of childhood, and which her cousin had already silenced, for that gaunt woman loved to impress those under her with salutary awe.  The sewing-women were delighted with Pierrette.  Their work, however, was not carried on without many and loud grumblings.

“That child will make us pay through the nose!” cried Sylvie to her brother.

“Stand still, my dear, and don’t plague us; it is all for you and not for me,” she would say to Pierrette when the child was being measured.  Sometimes it was, when Pierrette would ask the seamstress some question, “Let Mademoiselle Borain do her work, and don’t talk to her; it is not you who are paying for her time.”

“Mademoiselle,” said Mademoiselle Borain, “am I to back-stitch this?”

“Yes, do it firmly; I don’t want to be making such an outfit as this every day.”

Sylvie put the same spirit of emulation into Pierrette’s outfit that she had formerly put into the house.  She was determined that her cousin should be as well dressed as Madame Garceland’s little girl.  She bought the child fashionable boots of bronzed kid like those the little Tiphaines wore, very fine cotton stockings, a corset by the best maker, a dress of blue reps, a pretty cape lined with white silk, —­all this that she, Sylvie, might hold her own against the children of the women who had rejected her.  The underclothes were quite in keeping with the visible articles of dress, for Sylvie feared the examining eyes of the various mothers.  Pierrette’s chemises were of fine Madapolam calico.  Mademoiselle Borain had mentioned that the sub-prefect’s little girls wore cambric drawers, embroidered and trimmed in the latest style.  Pierrette had the same.  Sylvie ordered for her a charming little drawn bonnet of blue velvet lined with white satin, precisely like the one worn by Dr. Martener’s little daughter.