The others, paying no attention to the little girl, chatted together as they worked.  They talked of a wedding that was to take place that very day at St. Gervais.

“Suppose we go,” said a stout, red-haired girl, whose name was Malvina.  “It’s to be at noon.  We shall have time to go and get back again if we hurry.”

And, at the lunch hour, the whole party rushed downstairs four steps at a time.

Sidonie had brought her luncheon in a little basket, like a school-girl; with a heavy heart she sat at a corner of the table and ate alone for the first time in her life.  Great God! what a sad and wretched thing life seemed to be; what a terrible revenge she would take hereafter for her sufferings there!

At one o’clock the girls trooped noisily back, highly excited.

“Did you see the white satin gown?  And the veil of point d’Angleterre?  There’s a lucky girl!”

Thereupon they repeated in the workroom the remarks they had made in undertones in the church, leaning against the rail, throughout the ceremony.  That question of a wealthy marriage, of beautiful clothes, lasted all day long; nor did it interfere with their work-far from it.

These small Parisian industries, which have to do with the most trivial details of the toilet, keep the work-girls informed as to the fashions and fill their minds with thoughts of luxury and elegance.  To the poor girls who worked on Mademoiselle Le Mire’s fourth floor, the blackened walls, the narrow street did not exist.  They were always thinking of something else and passed their lives asking one another: 

“Malvina, if you were rich what would you do?  For my part, I’d live on the Champs-Elysees.”  And the great trees in the square, the carriages that wheeled about there, coquettishly slackening their pace, appeared momentarily before their minds, a delicious, refreshing vision.

Little Chebe, in her corner, listened without speaking, industriously stringing her black grapes with the precocious dexterity and taste she had acquired in Desiree’s neighborhood.  So that in the evening, when M. Chebe came to fetch his daughter, they praised her in the highest terms.

Thereafter all her days were alike.  The next day, instead of black pearls, she strung white pearls and bits of false coral; for at Mademoiselle Le Mire’s they worked only in what was false, in tinsel, and that was where little Chebe was to serve her apprenticeship to life.

For some time the new apprentice-being younger and better bred than the others—­found that they held aloof from her.  Later, as she grew older, she was admitted to their friendship and their confidence, but without ever sharing their pleasures.  She was too proud to go to see weddings at midday; and when she heard them talking of a ball at Vauxhall or the ‘Delices du Marais,’ or of a nice little supper at Bonvalet’s or at the ‘Quatre Sergents de la Rochelle,’ she was always very disdainful.