"

"But, perhaps, it would have been better to begin by that."

"Yes, but one is too stupid; one does not know how to catch the men, or
to frighten them. One is simple, confiding, and they only laugh at us.
Why, Mother Arsene, I am myself an example that would make you shudder;
but 'tis quite enough to have had one's sorrows, without fretting one's
self at the remembrance."

"What, my beauty! you, so young and gay, have had sorrows?"

"Ah, Mother Arsene! I believe you. At fifteen and a half I began to cry,
and never left off till I was sixteen. That was enough, I think."

"They deceived you, mademoiselle?"

"They did worse. They treated me as they have treated many a poor girl,
who had no more wish to go wrong than I had. My story is not a three
volume one. My father and mother are peasants near Saint-Valery, but
so poor--so poor, that having five children to provide for, they were
obliged to send me, at eight years old, to my aunt, who was a charwoman
here in Paris. The good woman took me out of charity, and very kind it
was of her, for I earned but little. At eleven years of age she sent me
to work in one of the factories of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. I don't
wish to speak, ill of the masters of these factories; but what do they
care, if little boys and girls are mixed up pell-mell with young men and
women of eighteen to twenty? Now you see, there, as everywhere, some are
no better than they should be; they are not particular in word or deed,
and I ask you, what art example for the children, who hear and see more
than you think for. Then, what happens? They get accustomed as they grow
older, to hear and see things, that afterwards will not shock them at
all."

"What you say there is true, Rose-Pompon. Poor children! who takes any
trouble about them?--not their father or mother, for they are at their
daily work."

"Yes, yes, Mother Arsene, it is all very well; it is easy to cry down a
young girl that has gone wrong; but if they knew all the ins and
outs, they would perhaps pity rather than blame her. To come back to
myself--at fifteen years old I was tolerably pretty. One day I had
something to ask of the head clerk. I went to him in his private room.
He told me he would grant what I wanted, and even take me under his
patronage, if I would listen to him; and he began by trying to kiss me.
I resisted. Then he said to me:--'You refuse my offer? You shall have no
more work; I discharge you from the factory.'"