, some
of them all but middle-aged, in common caps and aprons, with cotton
umbrellas, like cooks looking for a situation.

They never spoke to us, and seemed to be often brutally repulsed by
whatever men they did speak to--mostly men in blouses.

"O dis-donc, _Hor_tense! qu'y _fait_ froid! quand donc qu'y s'ra
_onze_ heures, q'nous allions nous _cou_cher?"

So said one of them to another one cold, drizzly night, in a raucous
voice, with low intonations of the gutter. The dimly felt horror and
despair and pathos of it sent us away shivering to our Passy omnibus
as fast as our legs could carry us.

That phrase has stuck in my memory ever since. Thank Heaven! the
eleventh hour must have struck long ago, and Hortense and her friend
must be fast asleep and well out of the cold by now--they need walk
those evil streets no more....

When we had exhausted it all, and we felt homesick for England
again, it was good to get back to Marsfield, high up over the
Thames--so beautiful in its rich October colors which the river
reflected--with its old trees that grew down to the water's edge,
and brooded by the boat-house there in the mellow sunshine.

And then again when it became cold and dreary, at Christmas-time
there was my big house at Lancaster Gate, where Josselins were fond
of spending some of the winter months, and where I managed to find
room for them all--with a little squeezing during the Christmas
holidays when the boys came home from school. What good times they
were!

* * * * *

"On May 24th, at Marsfield, Berks, the wife of Bartholomew Josselin,
of a daughter"--or, as Leah put it in her diary, "our seventh
daughter and ninth child--to be called Martia, or Marty for short."

It seems that Marty, prepared by her first ablution for this life,
and as she lay being powdered on Mrs. Jones's motherly lap, was of a
different type to her predecessors--much whiter, and lighter, and
slighter; and she made no exhibition of that lusty lung-power which
had so characterized the other little Barties on their introduction
to this vale of tears.

Her face was more regularly formed and more highly finished, and in
a few weeks grew of a beauty so solemn and pathetic that it would
sometimes make Mrs. Jones, who had lost babies of her own, shed
motherly tears merely to look at her.

Even _I_ felt sentimental about the child; and as for Barty, he
could talk of nothing else, and made those rough an