We looked higher than that, did we not, little Chebe?

Moreover, her father called for her every evening.  Sometimes, however, about the New Year, she was obliged to work late with the others, in order to complete pressing orders.  In the gaslight those pale-faced Parisians, sorting pearls as white as themselves, of a dead, unwholesome whiteness, were a painful spectacle.  There was the same fictitious glitter, the same fragility of spurious jewels.  They talked of nothing but masked balls and theatres.

“Have you seen Adele Page, in ‘Les Trois Mousquetaires?’ And Melingue?  And Marie Laurent?  Oh!  Marie Laurent!”

The actors’ doublets, the embroidered costumes of the queens of melodrama, appeared before them in the white light of the necklaces forming beneath their fingers.

In summer the work was less pressing.  It was the dull season.  In the intense heat, when through the drawn blinds fruit-sellers could be heard in the street, crying their mirabelles and Queen Claudes, the workgirls slept heavily, their heads on the table.  Or perhaps Malvina would go and ask Mademoiselle Le Mire for a copy of the ‘Journal pour Tous,’ and read aloud to the others.

But little Chebe did not care for the novels.  She carried one in her head much more interesting than all that trash.

The fact is, nothing could make her forget the factory.  When she set forth in the morning on her father’s arm, she always cast a glance in that direction.  At that hour the works were just stirring, the chimney emitted its first puff of black smoke.  Sidonie, as she passed, could hear the shouts of the workmen, the dull, heavy blows of the bars of the printing-press, the mighty, rhythmical hum of the machinery; and all those sounds of toil, blended in her memory with recollections of fetes and blue-lined carriages, haunted her persistently.

They spoke louder than the rattle of the omnibuses, the street cries, the cascades in the gutters; and even in the workroom, when she was sorting the false pearls even at night, in her own home, when she went, after dinner, to breathe the fresh air at the window on the landing and to gaze at the dark, deserted factory, that murmur still buzzed in her ears, forming, as it were, a continual accompaniment to her thoughts.

“The little one is tired, Madame Chebe.  She needs diversion.  Next Sunday I will take you all into the country.”

These Sunday excursions, which honest Risler organized to amuse Sidonie, served only to sadden her still more.

On those days she must rise at four o’clock in the morning; for the poor must pay for all their enjoyments, and there was always a ribbon to be ironed at the last moment, or a bit of trimming to be sewn on in an attempt to rejuvenate the everlasting little lilac frock with white stripes which Madame Chebe conscientiously lengthened every year.

They would all set off together, the Chebes, the Rislers, and the illustrious Delobelle.  Only Desiree and her mother never were of the party.  The poor, crippled child, ashamed of her deformity, never would stir from her chair, and Mamma Delobelle stayed behind to keep her company.  Moreover, neither possessed a suitable gown in which to show herself out-of-doors in their great man’s company; it would have destroyed the whole effect of his appearance.