turning
up. She expected, by one grand stroke, to repay the enforced loan she
had made upon her niece. She was fonder of the little Bridaus than she
was of her grandson Bixiou,--partly from a sense of the wrong she had
done them, partly because she felt the kindness of her niece, who, under
her worst deprivations, never uttered a word of reproach. So Philippe
and Joseph were cossetted, and the old gambler in the Imperial Lottery
of France (like others who have a vice or a weakness to atone for)
cooked them nice little dinners with plenty of sweets. Later on,
Philippe and Joseph could extract from her pocket, with the utmost
facility, small sums of money, which the younger used for pencils,
paper, charcoal and prints, the elder to buy tennis-shoes, marbles,
twine, and pocket-knives. Madame Descoings's passion forced her to be
content with fifty francs a month for her domestic expenses, so as to
gamble with the rest.

On the other hand, Madame Bridau, motherly love, kept her expenses down
to the same sum. By way of penance for her former over-confidence, she
heroically cut off her own little enjoyments. As with other timid souls
of limited intelligence, one shock to her feelings rousing her distrust
led her to exaggerate a defect in her character until it assumed the
consistency of a virtue. The Emperor, she said to herself, might forget
them; he might die in battle; her pension, at any rate, ceased with her
life. She shuddered at the risk her children ran of being left alone in
the world without means. Quite incapable of understanding Roguin when he
explained to her that in seven years Madame Descoings's assignment
would replace the money she had sold out of the Funds, she persisted in
trusting neither the notary nor her aunt, nor even the government; she
believed in nothing but herself and the privations she was practising.
By laying aside three thousand francs every year from her pension, she
would have thirty thousand francs at the end of ten years; which would
give fifteen hundred a year to her children. At thirty-six, she might
expect to live twenty years longer; and if she kept to the same system
of economy she might leave to each child enough for the bare necessaries
of life.

Thus the two widows passed from hollow opulence to voluntary
poverty,--one under the pressure of a vice, the other through the
promptings of the purest virtue. None of these petty details are useless
in teaching the lesson which ought to b