JACK IS INVITED TO TAKE UP A "PROFESSION"

From 'Jack'

"Do you hear, Jack?" resumed D'Argenton, with flashing eyes and
outstretched arm. "In four years you will be a good workman; that is to
say, the noblest, grandest thing that can exist in this world of slavery
and servitude. In four years you will be that sacred, venerated thing, a
good workman!"

Yes, indeed he heard it!--"a good workman." Only he was bewildered and
was trying to understand.

The child had seen workmen in Paris. There were some who lived in the
Passage des Douze Maisons, and not far from the Gymnase there was a
factory, from which he often watched them as they left work at about six
o'clock; a crowd of dirty-looking men with their blouses all stained
with oil, and their rough hands blackened and deformed by work.

The idea that he would have to wear a blouse struck him at once. He
remembered the tone of contempt with which his mother would say: "Those
are workmen, men in blouses,"--the care she took in the streets to avoid
the contact of their soiled garments. Labassindre's fine speeches on the
duties and influence of the working-man in the nineteenth century
attenuated and contradicted, it is true, these vague impressions. But
what he did understand, and that most clearly and bitterly, was that he
must go away, leave the forest whose tree-tops he saw from the window,
leave the Rivalses, leave his mother, his mother whom he had recovered
at the cost of so much pain, and whom he loved so tenderly.

What on earth was she doing at that window all this time, seeming so
indifferent to all that was going on around her? Within the last few
minutes, however, she had lost her immovable indifference. A convulsive
shudder seemed to shake her from head to foot, and the hand she held
over her eyes closed over them as if she were hiding tears. Was it then
so sad a sight that she beheld yonder in the country, on the far horizon
where the sun sets, and where so many dreams, so many illusions, so many
loves and passions sink and disappear, never to return?

"Then I shall have to go away?" inquired the child in a smothered voice,
and the automatic air of one who lets his thought speak, the one thought
that absorbed him.

At this artless question all the members of the tribunal looked at each
other with a smile of pity; but over there at the window a great sob was
heard.

"We shall start in a week, my lad," answered Labassindre briskly. "I
have