Her mother kept her apart from girls of her own age, unless these belonged to one of those few families where learning was esteemed. She was never allowed to forget that some day she would leave her father's shop and be a great lady in England.
Whilst Mme. Legros and the kindly bonhomme Armand gradually drifted in their middle age to the bourgeois manners and customs of their time and station, they jealously fostered in their only child that sense of elegance and refinement which mayhap she had inherited from one of her remote ancestors, or mayhap had received as a special gift from the fairy godmother who presided at her birth.
Mme. Legros cooked and scoured, Master Armand made surcoats and breeches, but Rose Marie was never allowed to spoil her hands with scrubbing, or to waste her time presiding over the stewpot. Her father had bought her a pair of gloves; these she always wore when she went out, and she always had stockings and leather shoes on her feet. As the girl grew up, she gradually assimilated to herself more and more this idea that she was to be a great lady. She never doubted her future for a moment. Her father from sheer fondness, her mother from positive conviction, kept the certitude alive within her.
But it became quite impossible to keep from the girl's growing intelligence all knowledge of the Kestyon's misdeeds. The worthy tailor who was passing rich kept but a very small house, in which the one living room, situate just above the shop, was the family meeting ground. Rose Marie could not be kept out of the room every time her father and mother talked over the freshly-discovered deceits and frauds practised by their new relations.
We must suppose that the subject thus became such a familiar one with the child-wife from the moment when she first began to comprehend it, that it never acquired any horror or even shame for her. Mistress Angélique Kestyon had grossly deceived papa and maman; they were not so rich or so grand just now as they had represented themselves to be, but it would all come right in the end—maman at least was quite sure of that.
If—as time went on and Rose Marie from a child became a girl—that pleasing optimism somewhat gave way, this was no doubt due to too much book learning. Rose Marie was very fond of books, and books we all know have a tendency to destroy the innocent belief in the goodness of this world. This at least was Papa Legros' opinion.
Mme. Legros spoke less and less on the subject. She hoped.
She hoped resolutely and persistently, whilst the Kestyons from distant Virginia begged repeatedly for money. She went on hoping even whilst urging her husband to cut off further supplies, after ten years of this perpetual sponging. She still hoped whilst no news whatever came from the emigrants and when the rumour reached her that young Rupert Kestyon had died out there.
At this point, however, her optimism took a fresh turn. She hoped that the rumour was true, and that Rose Marie was now free to wed some other equally high-born but more reliable gentleman. She continued to hope despite the difficulty of proving that the young man had really died, and Monseigneur the Archbishop's refusal to grant permission for a second marriage.
Then when the news filtered through from England as far as the back shop in the Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie that Rupert Kestyon was not only alive but had—by a wonderful, almost miraculous series of events—inherited the title and estates of his deceased kinsman and was now of a truth by the will of God and the law of his country milor of Stowmaries, and one of the greatest gentleman in the whole of England, Mme. Legros' optimism found its crowning glory in its justification.