Signora Gilberte is the very goddess of music," he said to M.
Favoral, with transports of enthusiasm, which intensified still his
frightful accent.

The cashier of the Mutual Credit Society shrugged his shoulders,
answering that there is no harmony for a man who spends his days
listening to the exciting music of golden coins. In spite of which
his vanity seemed highly gratified, when on Saturday evenings, after
dinner, Mlle. Gilberte sat at the piano, and Mme. Desclavettes,
suppressing a yawn, would exclaim,

"What remarkable talent the dear child has!"

The young girl had, then, a positive influence; and it was to her
entreaties alone, and not to those of his wife, that he had several
times forgiven Maxence. He would have done much more for her, had
she wished it; but she would have been compelled to ask, to insist,
to beg.

"And it's humiliating," she used to say.

Sometimes Mme. Favoral scolded her gently, saying that her father
would certainly not refuse her one of those pretty toilets which are
the ambition and the joy of young girls.

But she:

"It is much less mortification to me to wear these rags than to meet
with a refusal," she replied. "I am satisfied with my dresses."

With such a character, surrounded, however, by a meek resignation,
and an unalterable _sang-froid_, she inspired a certain respect to
both her mother and her brother, who admired in her an energy of
which they felt themselves incapable.

And when she appeared, and commenced reproaching him in an indignant
tone of voice, with the baseness of his conduct, and his insatiate
demands, Maxence was almost stunned.

"I did not know," he commenced, turning as red as fire.

She crushed him with a look of mingled contempt and pity; and, in
an accent of haughty irony:

"Indeed," she said, "you do not know whence the money comes that
you extort from our mother!"

And holding up her hand, still remarkably handsome, though slightly
deformed by the constant handling of the needle; the fourth finger
of the right hand bent by the thread, and the fore-finger of the
left tattooed and lacerated by the needle:

"Indeed," she repeated, "you do not know that my mother and myself,
we spend all our days, and the greater part of our nights, working?"

Hanging his head, he said nothing.

"If it were for myself alone," she continued, "I would not speak to
you thus. But look at our mother! See her poor eyes, red and weak
from her ceaseless labor