She had already broken the bread and butter into two pieces. The young man, taking his half, restrained himself from devouring it all at once, and placed his arms on his thighs, so that she should not see how he trembled. With her quiet air of good comradeship she lay beside him, at full length on her stomach, with her chin in one hand, slowly eating with the other. Their lamps, placed between them, lit up their faces.
Catherine looked at him a moment in silence. She must have found him handsome, with his delicate face and black moustache. She vaguely smiled with pleasure.
"Then you are an engine-driver, and they sent you away from your railway. Why?"
"Because I struck my chief."
She remained stupefied, overwhelmed, with her hereditary ideas of subordination and passive obedience.
"I ought to say that I had been drinking," he went on, and when I drink I get mad—I could devour myself, and I could devour other people. Yes; I can't swallow two small glasses without wanting to kill someone. Then I am ill for two days."
"You mustn't drink," she said, seriously.
"Ah, don't be afraid. I know myself."
And he shook his head. He hated brandy with the hatred of the last child of a race of drunkards, who suffered in his flesh from all those ancestors, soaked and driven mad by alcohol to such a point that the least drop had become poison to him.
"It is because of mother that I didn't like being turned into the street," he said, after having swallowed a mouthful. "Mother is not happy, and I used to send her a five-franc piece now and then."