"Very favourably, of course," responded the sick woman, with a sardonic smile. "Such cattle as we are, are only fit to be sold when we are young, or to sell others when we are old."
"Ah, well, Mother Lacombe, to quiet your scruples, if you have any, you shall have sixty francs a month for your snuff, and I shall also make you a present of a handsome shawl, so you can go around respectably with Mariette, whom you are never to leave for a moment, understand, for I am as jealous as a tiger, and have no intention of being made a fool of."
"All this tallies exactly with what I said to Mariette only this morning. 'You are an honest girl,' I said to her, 'and yet you can scarcely earn twenty sous a day making three hundred franc chemises for a kept woman.'"
"Three hundred franc chemises ordered from Madame Jourdan's? Oh, yes, Mother Lacombe, I know. They are for Amandine, who is kept by the Marquis de Saint-Herem, an intimate friend of mine. It was I who induced her to patronise Madame Jourdan,—a regular bonanza for her, though the marquis is very poor pay, but he makes all his furnishers as well as all his mistresses the fashion. This little Amandine was a clerk in a little perfumery shop on the Rue Colbert six months ago, and Saint-Herem has made her the rage. There is no woman in Paris half as much talked about as Amandine. The same thing may happen to Mariette some day, Mother Lacombe. She may be wearing three hundred franc chemises instead of making them. Don't it make you proud to think of it?"
"Unless Mariette has the same fate as another poor girl I knew."
"What happened to her, Mother Lacombe?"
"She was robbed."
"Robbed?"
"She, too, was promised mountains of gold. The man who promised it placed her in furnished apartments, and at the end of three months left her without a penny. Then she killed herself in despair."
"Really, Mother Lacombe, what kind of a man do you take me for?" demanded the stranger, indignantly. "Do I look like a scoundrel, like a Robert Macaire?"