Sure enough a time will come when he will pay more attention to the girls, and think a great deal less of his mother:  let us hope she will like it as well as she seemed to fancy.  But it is odd enough; the very women who profess most contempt for mankind as a sex, seem to find even its ugliest particulars rather lively and high-minded in their own sons.

The little girl looked longer and with more interest, probably because she was in her own house, while he was a traveller and accustomed to strange sights.  And besides there was no galette in the case with her.

All the time of supper, there was nothing spoken of but my young lord.  The two parents were both absurdly fond of their child.  Monsieur kept insisting on his sagacity:  how he knew all the children at school by name; and when this utterly failed on trial, how he was cautious and exact to a strange degree, and if asked anything, he would sit and think—­and think, and if he did not know it, ’my faith, he wouldn’t tell you at all—­foi, il ne vous le dira pas’:  which is certainly a very high degree of caution.  At intervals, M. Hector would appeal to his wife, with his mouth full of beefsteak, as to the little fellow’s age at such or such a time when he had said or done something memorable; and I noticed that Madame usually pooh-poohed these inquiries.  She herself was not boastful in her vein; but she never had her fill of caressing the child; and she seemed to take a gentle pleasure in recalling all that was fortunate in his little existence.  No schoolboy could have talked more of the holidays which were just beginning and less of the black school-time which must inevitably follow after.  She showed, with a pride perhaps partly mercantile in origin, his pockets preposterously swollen with tops and whistles and string.  When she called at a house in the way of business, it appeared he kept her company; and whenever a sale was made, received a sou out of the profit.  Indeed they spoiled him vastly, these two good people.  But they had an eye to his manners for all that, and reproved him for some little faults in breeding, which occurred from time to time during supper.

On the whole, I was not much hurt at being taken for a pedlar.  I might think that I ate with greater delicacy, or that my mistakes in French belonged to a different order; but it was plain that these distinctions would be thrown away upon the landlady and the two labourers.  In all essential things we and the Gilliards cut very much the same figure in the ale-house kitchen.  M. Hector was more at home, indeed, and took a higher tone with the world; but that was explicable on the ground of his driving a donkey-cart, while we poor bodies tramped afoot.  I daresay, the rest of the company thought us dying with envy, though in no ill sense, to be as far up in the profession as the new arrival.