Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/63

 says that Jeanne says the American lady never does anything about the house, and doesn't even verify her accounts. You can just imagine what Jeanne is getting out of it. It quite upsets Marguerite, and I have to be specially careful with my own accounts. Everybody near them is getting a rake-off on everything." She made these revelations with a satisfied look as though the words had a pleasant taste in her mouth.

Madame Fortier's comment was made with the accent of mature, worldly experience, "Mark my words, money spent in a loose careless way like that must have been ill come by. That's the way disreputable women spend money."

"It's very hard on the rest of us, at any rate. And Jeanne tells our Margot that she is a very poor housekeeper, as heedless as a child, wears her best tailored street dress in the house as like as not, lies down on the bed when she is not sick at all, and doesn't do a thing but read novels all the time; or fool away a whole afternoon in the Museum. Very suspicious, that, too. Why should anybody go to the Museum so much? I'd just like to know whom she meets there. A regular place of rendezvous, the Museum. I wonder if her husband knows."

They were enjoying the conversation so much that their faces looked quite sunny and bright. The other shook her head forebodingly. There was a silence as they climbed steadily up the steep, narrow, stone-flagged street.

Then Madame Garnier remarked, "The little girl is quite pretty, though so mannerless."

"Her dress was covered with grease spots, and had a hook off the back," reported Madame Fortier.

"I didn't see but three grease spots," demurred Madame Garnier, "and she really has lovely eyes and hair."

"How badly that woman speaks French. Without the little girl to interpret, it would actually have been hard to know what she was saying. Strange they don't know French better. But perhaps they don't have regular schools like ours."

Madame Garnier made no answer to this conjecture, but asked, looking sideways at her neighbor, "Shall you ask them to dinner?"