o worked on Mademoiselle Le Mire's fourth floor, the blackened
walls, the narrow street did not exist. They were always thinking of
something else and passed their lives asking one another:

"Malvina, if you were rich what would you do? For my part, I'd live on
the Champs-Elysees." And the great trees in the square, the carriages
that wheeled about there, coquettishly slackening their pace, appeared
momentarily before their minds, a delicious, refreshing vision.

Little Chebe, in her corner, listened without speaking, industriously
stringing her black grapes with the precocious dexterity and taste she
had acquired in Desiree's neighborhood. So that in the evening, when M.
Chebe came to fetch his daughter, they praised her in the highest terms.

Thereafter all her days were alike. The next day, instead of black
pearls, she strung white pearls and bits of false coral; for at
Mademoiselle Le Mire's they worked only in what was false, in tinsel, and
that was where little Chebe was to serve her apprenticeship to life.

For some time the new apprentice-being younger and better bred than the
others--found that they held aloof from her. Later, as she grew older,
she was admitted to their friendship and their confidence, but without
ever sharing their pleasures. She was too proud to go to see weddings at
midday; and when she heard them talking of a ball at Vauxhall or the
'Delices du Marais,' or of a nice little supper at Bonvalet's or at the
'Quatre Sergents de la Rochelle,' she was always very disdainful.

We looked higher than that, did we not, little Chebe?

Moreover, her father called for her every evening. Sometimes, however,
about the New Year, she was obliged to work late with the others, in
order to complete pressing orders. In the gaslight those pale-faced
Parisians, sorting pearls as white as themselves, of a dead, unwholesome
whiteness, were a painful spectacle. There was the same fictitious
glitter, the same fragility of spurious jewels. They talked of nothing
but masked balls and theatres.

"Have you seen Adele Page, in 'Les Trois Mousquetaires?' And Melingue?
And Marie Laurent? Oh! Marie Laurent!"

The actors' doublets, the embroidered costumes of the queens of
melodrama, appeared before them in the white light of the necklaces
forming beneath their fingers.

In summer the work was less pressing. It was the dull season. In the
intense heat, when through the drawn blinds fruit-sellers could be heard
in the