Bébée; Or, Two Little Wooden Shoes

E-text prepared by Sara Peattie, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
Or, Two Little Wooden Shoes
1896
Bébée sprang out of bed at daybreak. She was sixteen.
It seemed a very wonderful thing to be as much as that—sixteen—a woman quite.
A cock was crowing under her lattice. He said how old you are!—how old you are! every time that he sounded his clarion.
She opened the lattice and wished him good day, with a laugh. It was so pleasant to be woke by him, and to think that no one in all the world could ever call one a child any more.
There was a kid bleating in the shed. There was a thrush singing in the dusk of the sycamore leaves. There was a calf lowing to its mother away there beyond the fence. There were dreamy muffled bells ringing in the distance from many steeples and belfries where the city was; they all said one thing, How good it is to be so old as that—how good, how very good!
Bébée was very pretty.
No one in all Brabant ever denied that. To look at her it seemed as if she had so lived among the flowers that she had grown like them, and only looked a bigger blossom—that was all.
She wore two little wooden shoes and a little cotton cap, and a gray kirtle—linen in summer, serge in winter; but the little feet in the shoes were like rose leaves, and the cap was as white as a lily, and the gray kirtle was like the bark of the bough that the apple-blossom parts, and peeps out of, to blush in the sun.