right off and
earn some money. The few sous I had laid by are all gone. Oh! let me sit
down. You look so pleased--it gives me a turn--it makes my head spin. I
haven't any legs."

And she sank into a chair. Jupillon stooped over her to kiss her.

"Ah! yes, they're not there any longer," she said, seeing that he was
looking for her earrings. "They've gone like my rings. D'ye see, all
gone----"

And she showed him her hands, bare of the paltry gems she had worked so
long to buy.

"They all went for the easy-chair, you see--but it's all horsehair."

As Jupillon stood in front of her with an embarrassed air, as if he were
trying to find words with which to thank her, she continued:

"Why, you're a funny fellow. What's the matter with you? Ah! it's on
that account, is it?" And she pointed to the bedroom. "You're a stupid!
I love you, don't I? Well then?"

Germinie said the words simply, as the heart says sublime things.

XIX

She became _enceinte_.

At first she doubted, she dared not believe it. But when she was certain
of the fact, she was filled with immeasurable joy, a joy that overflowed
her heart. Her happiness was so great and so overpowering that it
stifled at a single stroke the anguish, the fear, the inward trembling
that ordinarily disturb the maternity of unmarried women and poisons
their anticipations of childbirth, the divine hope that lives and moves
within them. The thought of the scandal caused by the discovery of her
_liaison_, of the outcry in the quarter, the idea of the abominable
thing that had always made her think of suicide: dishonor,--even the
fear of being detected by mademoiselle and dismissed by her--nothing of
all this could cast a shadow on her felicity. The child that she
expected allowed her to see nothing but it, as if she had it already in
her arms before her; and, hardly attempting to conceal her condition,
she bore her woman's shame almost proudly through the streets, exulting
and radiant in the thought that she was to be a mother.

She was unhappy only because she had spent all her savings, and was not
only without money but had been paid several months' wages in advance by
her mistress. She bitterly deplored having to receive her child in a
poor way. Often, as she passed through Rue Saint-Lazare, she would stop
in front of a linen-draper's, in whose windows were displayed stores of
rich baby-linen. She would devour with her eyes the pretty, dainty
flowered garments,