's pale, withered face was quite in harmony with the
darkness of the street and the mustiness of the place. As she sat there,
motionless, in her chair, it might have been thought that she was as
inseparable from the house as a snail from its brown shell; her face,
alert with a vague expression of mischief, was framed in a flat cap made
of net, which barely covered her white hair; her fine, gray eyes were as
quiet as the street, and the many wrinkles in her face might be compared
to the cracks in the walls. Whether she had been born to poverty, or
had fallen from some past splendor, she now seemed to have been long
resigned to her melancholy existence.

From sunrise till dark, excepting when she was getting a meal ready, or,
with a basket on her arm, was out purchasing provisions, the old woman
sat in the adjoining room by the further window, opposite a young girl.
At any hour of the day the passer-by could see the needlewoman seated
in an old, red velvet chair, bending over an embroidery frame, and
stitching indefatigably.

Her mother had a green pillow on her knee, and busied herself with
hand-made net; but her fingers could move the bobbin but slowly;
her sight was feeble, for on her nose there rested a pair of those
antiquated spectacles which keep their place on the nostrils by the grip
of a spring. By night these two hardworking women set a lamp between
them; and the light, concentrated by two globe-shaped bottles of water,
showed the elder the fine network made by the threads on her pillow,
and the younger the most delicate details of the pattern she was
embroidering. The outward bend of the window had allowed the girl to
rest a box of earth on the window-sill, in which grew some sweet peas,
nasturtiums, a sickly little honeysuckle, and some convolvulus that
twined its frail stems up the iron bars. These etiolated plants produced
a few pale flowers, and added a touch of indescribable sadness and
sweetness to the picture offered by this window, in which the two
figures were appropriately framed.

The most selfish soul who chanced to see this domestic scene would carry
away with him a perfect image of the life led in Paris by the working
class of women, for the embroideress evidently lived by her needle.
Many, as they passed through the turnstile, found themselves wondering
how a girl could preserve her color, living in such a cellar. A student
of lively imagination, going that way to cross to the Quartier-Latin,