Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/318

 painter would delight to paint. Young, too, with winning manners, she would not have far to look for assistance in her difficulties with term-day, work-girls, and other expenses. Her father, an invalid, and her mother live in a suburb, and she dwells alone all the week in a somewhat squalid flat near the Bon Marché, her own protector, and needing none other; such is her indestructible purity. No well-born girl could show a more delicate reserve towards men than this pretty French dressmaker, no nun could reveal herself less of a flirt. Her sole desire is to please her customers and extend her connexion, to work early and late, sometimes into the small hours of the morning; and her sole distraction, after a week's hard labour, is to go out to her parents in a dusty suburb beyond Sant-Ouen, from Saturday evening to Monday morning. She never grumbles, she is never unhappy; and though I give her books and encourage her to talk to me about them, I have never detected in her remarks a particle of envy or discontent with her humble lot. Her mind is clear and fresh, essentially a lady's mind, and her notions on the score of honesty are as primitive as those of the poet who taught us in our infancy that it was a sin to steal a pin. Quite as good and graceful pictures may be drawn from the lower class of sempstresses who come to the house and work by the day.