rge kitchen.

"Melie! are you there, Melie?"

A young girl appeared. At a word from him she drew some liquor and came
back to the table to serve the gentlemen.

Her wheat-coloured head-bands fell over a cap of grey linen. Her worn
dress of poor material fell down her entire body without a crease, and,
with her straight nose and blue eyes, she had about her something
dainty, rustic, and ingenuous.

"She's nice, eh?" said the joiner, while she was bringing them the
glasses. "You might take her for a lady dressed up as a peasant-girl,
and yet able to do rough work! Poor little heart, come! When I'm rich
I'll marry you!"

"You are always talking nonsense, _Monsieur_ Gorju," she replied, in a
soft voice, with a slightly drawling accent.

A stable boy came in to get some oats out of an old chest, and let the
lid fall down so awkwardly that it made splinters of wood fly upwards.

Gorju declaimed against the clumsiness of all "these country fellows,"
then, on his knees in front of the article of furniture, he tried to put
the piece in its place. Pecuchet, while offering to assist him, traced
beneath the dust faces of notable characters.

It was a chest of the Renaissance period, with a twisted fringe below,
vine branches in the corner, and little columns dividing its front into
five portions. In the centre might be seen Venus-Anadyomene standing on
a shell, then Hercules and Omphale, Samson and Delilah, Circe and her
swine, the daughters of Lot making their father drunk; and all this in a
state of complete decay, the chest being worm-eaten, and even its right
panel wanting.

Gorju took a candle, in order to give Pecuchet a better view of the left
one, which exhibited Adam and Eve under a tree in Paradise in an
affectionate attitude.

Bouvard equally admired the chest.

"If you keep it they'll give it to you cheap."

They hesitated, thinking of the necessary repairs.

Gorju might do them, cabinet-making being a branch of his trade.

"Let us go. Come on."

And he dragged Pecuchet towards the fruit-garden, where Madame
Castillon, the mistress, was spreading linen.

Melie, when she had washed her hands, took from where it lay beside the
window her lace-frame, sat down in the broad daylight and worked.

The lintel of the door enclosed her like a picture-frame. The bobbins
disentangled themselves under her fingers with a sound like the clicking
of castanets. Her profile remained bent.

Bouvard asked her questio