essed. In the centre
of that one room where the family slept and ate, Euphrasie sat on a
straw-bottomed chair; and although she was barely thirty years of age,
one might have taken her for a little old woman of fifty; so thin and so
withered did she look that she resembled one of those fruits, suddenly
deprived of sap, that dry up on the tree. Her teeth had fallen, and
of her hair she only retained a few white locks. But the more
characteristic mark of this mature senility was a wonderful loss of
muscular strength, an almost complete disappearance of will, energy,
and power of action, so that she now spent whole days, idle, stupefied,
without courage even to raise a finger.

When Cecile told her that her visitor was M. Froment, the former chief
designer at the Beauchene works, she did not even seem to recognize him;
she no longer took interest in anything. And when her sister spoke
of the object of her visit, asking for the work with which she had
entrusted her, she answered with a gesture of utter weariness: "Oh! what
can you expect! It takes me too long to stick all those little bits of
cardboard together. I can't do it; it throws me into a perspiration."

Then a stout woman, who was cutting some bread and butter for the three
children, intervened with an air of quiet authority: "You ought to take
those materials away, Mademoiselle Cecile. She's incapable of doing
anything with them. They will end by getting dirty, and then your people
won't take them back."

This stout woman was a certain Madame Joseph, a widow of forty and a
charwoman by calling, whom Benard, the husband, had at first engaged to
come two hours every morning to attend to the housework, his wife not
having strength enough to put on a child's shoes or to set a pot on
the fire. At first Euphrasie had offered furious resistance to this
intrusion of a stranger, but, her physical decline progressing, she had
been obliged to yield. And then things had gone from bad to worse, till
Madame Joseph became supreme in the household. Between times there had
been terrible scenes over it all; but the wretched Euphrasie, stammering
and shivering, had at last resigned herself to the position, like some
little old woman sunk into second childhood and already cut off from the
world. That Benard and Madame Joseph were not bad-hearted in reality
was shown by the fact that although Euphrasie was now but an useless
encumbrance, they kept her with them, instead of flinging