y, selected by Madame Valentine Gozlan from works of an
educational or moral kind, for the use of the staff. Marie, whose
imagination goes further afield than mine, and who has not my
anxieties, directs the reading. She opens a book and reads aloud while
I take my ease, looking at the pastel portrait which hangs just
opposite the window. On the glass which entombs the picture I see the
gently moving and puffing reflection of the fidgety window curtains,
and the face of that glazed portrait becomes blurred with broken
streaks and all kinds of wave marks.

"Ah, these adventures!" Marie sometimes sighs, at the end of a chapter;
"these things that never happen!"

"Thank Heaven," I cry.

"Alas," she replies.

Even when people live together they differ more than they think!

At other times Marie reads to herself, quite silently. I surprise her
absorbed in this occupation. It even happens that she applies herself
thus to poetry. In her set and stooping face her eyes come and go over
the abbreviated lines of the verses. From time to time she raises them
and looks up at the sky, and--vastly further than the visible sky--at
all that escapes from the little cage of words.

And sometimes we are lightly touched with boredom.

* * * * * *

One evening Marie informed me that the canary was dead, and she began
to cry, as she showed me the open cage and the bird which lay at the
bottom, with its feet curled up, as rumpled and stark as the little
yellow plaything of a doll. I sympathized with her sorrow; but her
tears were endless, and I found her emotion disproportionate.

"Come now," I said, "after all, a bird's only a bird, a mere point that
moved a little in a corner of the room. What then? What about the
thousands of birds that die, and the people that die, and the poor?"
But she shook her head, insisted on grieving, tried to prove to me that
it was momentous and that she was right.

For a moment I stood bewildered by this want of understanding; this
difference between her way of feeling and mine. It was a disagreeable
revelation of the unknown. One might often, in regard to small
matters, make a multitude of reflections if one wished; but one does
not wish.

* * * * * *

My position at the factory and in our quarter is becoming gradually
stronger. By reason of a regular gratuity which I received, we are at
last able to put money aside