“Then, if I understand you rightly, Jeanne, you are at once a pupil here and a mistress? It is a condition of existence very common in the world. You are punished, and you punish?”
“Oh, Monsieur!” she exclaimed. “No! I never punish!”
“Then, I suspect,” said I, “that your indulgence gets you many scoldings from Mademoiselle Prefere?”
She smiled, and blinked.
Then I said to her that the troubles in which we often involve ourselves, by trying to act according to our conscience and to do the best we can, are never of the sort that totally dishearten and weary us, but are, on the contrary, wholesome trials. This sort of philosophy touched her very little. She even appeared totally unmoved by my moral exhortations. But was not this quite natural on her part?—and ought I not to have remembered that it is only those no longer innocent who can find pleasure in the systems of moralists?... I had at least good sense enough to cut short my sermonising.
“Jeanne,” I said, “you were asking a moment ago about Madame de Gabry. Let us talk about that Fairy of yours She was very prettily made. Do you do any modelling in wax now?”
“I have not a bit of wax,” she exclaimed, wringing her hands—“no wax at all!”
“No wax!” I cried—“in a republic of busy bees?”
She laughed.
“And, then, you see, Monsieur, my FIGURINES, as you call them, are not in Mademoiselle Prefere’s programme. But I had begun to make a very small Saint-George for Madame de Gabry—a tiny little Saint-George, with a golden cuirass. Is not that right, Monsieur Bonnard—to give Saint-George a gold cuirass?”