yone, it didn't matter who! It was one of the
times when I had to have someone! At those times I don't know anything
or see anything. I'm not myself at all. I took you because it was a hot
day!"

She paused an instant.

"Go on," said Gautruche, "iron me on all the seams. Don't mind me as
long as your hand's in."

"So?" continued Germinie, "how enchanted you imagined I was going to be
to take up with you! You said to yourself: 'The good-natured fool!
she'll be glad of the chance! And all I shall have to do will be to
promise to marry her. She'll throw up her place. She'll leave her
mistress in the lurch.' The idea! Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle, who has no
one but me! Ah! you don't know anything about such things. You wouldn't
understand if I should tell you. Mademoiselle, who is everything to me!
Why, since my mother died, I've had nobody but her, never been treated
kindly by anybody but her! Who beside her ever said to me when I was
unhappy: 'Are you unhappy?' And, when I was sick: 'Don't you feel well?'
No one! There's been no one but her to take care of me, to care what
became of me. God! and you talk of loving on account of what there is
between us! Ah! mademoiselle has loved me! Yes, loved me! And I'm dying
of it, do you know? of having become such a miserable creature as I am,
a----" She said the word. "And of deceiving her, of stealing her
affection, of allowing her still to love me as her daughter! Ah! if she
should ever learn anything--but, no fear of that, it won't be long.
There's one woman who would make a pretty leap out of a fifth-story
window, as true as God is my master! But fancy--you are not my heart,
you are not my life, you are only my pleasure. But I did have a man. Ah!
I don't know whether I loved him! but you could have torn me to pieces
for him without a word from me. In short, he was the man that made me
what I am. Well, d'ye see, when my passion for him was at its hottest,
when I breathed only as he wished me to, when I was mad over him and
would have let him walk on my stomach if he'd wanted to--even then, if
mademoiselle had been sick, if she had motioned to me with her little
finger, I'd have gone back to her. Yes, I would have left him for her! I
tell you I would have left him!"

"In that case--if that's the way things stand, my dear--if you're so
fond of your old lady as that, I have only one piece of advice to give
you: you'd better not leave your good lady, d'ye see!"

"That's my dism