g to bed now. Some other time."

And she went away.

She had had to "fly around," as she said, to scrape together such a sum,
to accomplish that impossibility: to raise two thousand three hundred
francs--two thousand three hundred francs, of which she had not the
first five! She had collected them, begged them, extorted them piece by
piece, almost sou by sou. She had picked them up, scraped them together
here and there, from this one and from that one, by loans of two
hundred, one hundred, fifty, twenty francs, or whatever sum anyone would
lend. She had borrowed from her concierge, her grocer, her fruit woman,
her poulterer, her laundress; she had borrowed from all the dealers in
the quarter, and from the dealers in the quarters where she had
previously lived with mademoiselle. She had made up the amount with
money drawn from every source, even from her poor miserable
water-carrier. She had gone a-begging everywhere, importuned humbly,
prayed, implored, invented fables, swallowed the shame of lying and
of seeing that she was not believed. The humiliation of confessing that
she had no money laid by, as was supposed, and as, through pride, she
had encouraged people to suppose, the sympathy of people she despised,
the refusals, the alms, she had undergone everything, endured what she
would not have endured to procure bread for herself, and not once only,
with a single person, but with thirty, forty, all those who had given
her something or from whom she had hoped for something.

[Illustration: Chapter XXXI

_At last, one evening about half past ten, she pushed the door open,
entered the shop without a word of greeting, walked up to the little
table where the mother and son were sitting half asleep, and placed upon
it, beneath her hand which was closed like a claw, an old piece of cloth
that gave forth a ringing sound._

_"There it is!" said she._]

At last she had succeeded in collecting the money; but it was her master
and had possession of her forever. Her life thenceforth belonged to the
obligations she had entered into with all these people, to the service
her dealers had rendered her, knowing very well what they were doing.
She belonged to her debt, to the sum she would have to pay every year.
She knew it; she knew that all her wages would go in that way; that with
the rates of interest, which she had left entirely at the discretion of
her creditors, and the written obligations demanded by them,
mademoisell