painstaking.
But he already had those ideas of his, and quarrelled with people, and
tried to bring his mates over to his views; and so he was unable to stay
anywhere. At last, when he was thirty, he was stupid enough to go to
America with an inventor, who traded on him to such a point that after
six years of it he came back ill and penniless. I must tell you that he
had married my younger sister Leonie, and that she died before he went to
America, leaving him little Celine, who was then only a year old. I was
then living with my husband, Theodore Labitte, a mason; and it's not to
brag that I say it, but however much I wore out my eyes with needlework
he used to beat me till he left me half-dead on the floor. But he ended
by deserting me and going off with a young woman of twenty, which, after
all, caused me more pleasure than grief. And naturally when Salvat came
back he sought me out and found me alone with his little Celine, whom he
had left in my charge when he went away, and who called me mamma. And
we've all three been living together since then--"

She became somewhat embarrassed, and then, as if to show that she did not
altogether lack some respectable family connections, she went on to say:
"For my part I've had no luck; but I've another sister, Hortense, who's
married to a clerk, Monsieur Chretiennot, and lives in a pretty lodging
on the Boulevard Rochechouart. There were three of us born of my father's
second marriage,--Hortense, who's the youngest, Leonie, who's dead, and
myself, Pauline, the eldest. And of my father's first marriage I've still
a brother Eugene Toussaint, who is ten years older than me and is an
engineer like Salvat, and has been working ever since the war in the same
establishment, the Grandidier factory, only a hundred steps away in the
Rue Marcadet. The misfortune is that he had a stroke lately. As for me,
my eyes are done for; I ruined them by working ten hours a day at fine
needlework. And now I can no longer even try to mend anything without my
eyes filling with water till I can't see at all. I've tried to find
charwoman's work, but I can't get any; bad luck always follows us. And so
we are in need of everything; we've nothing but black misery, two or
three days sometimes going by without a bite, so that it's like the
chance life of a dog that feeds on what it can find. And with these last
two months of bitter cold to freeze us, it's sometimes made us think that
one morning we should ne