"Ah!" said Fleur-de-Marie, with a deep sigh, "to be quite happy, we must be quite virtuous."
"Oh, what is your little head about now?" exclaimed the Chourineur, with a loud burst of laughter. "Why not count your rosary in honour of your father and mother, whom you never knew?"
"My father and mother abandoned me in the street like a puppy that is one too many in the house; perhaps they had not enough to feed themselves," said Goualeuse, with bitterness. "I want nothing of them,—I complain of nothing,—but there are lots happier than mine."
"Yours! Why, what would you have? You are as handsome as a Venus, and yet only sixteen and a half; you sing like a nightingale, behave yourself very prettily, are called Fleur-de-Marie, and yet you complain! What will you say, I should like to know, when you will have a stove under your 'paddlers,' and a chinchilla boa, like the ogress?"
"Oh, I shall never be so old as she is."
"Perhaps you have a charm for never growing any older?"
"No; but I could not lead such a life. I have already a bad cough."
"Ah, I see you already in the 'cold-meat box.' Go along, you silly child, you!"
"Do you often have such thoughts as these, Goualeuse?" said Rodolph.
"Sometimes. You, perhaps, M. Rodolph, understand me. In the morning, when I go to buy my milk from the milkwoman at the corner of Rue de la Vieille-Draperie, with the sous which the ogress gives me, and see her go away in her little cart drawn by her donkey, I do envy her so, and I say to myself, 'She is going into the country, to the pure air, to her home and her family;' and then I return alone into the garret of the ogress, where you cannot see plainly even at noonday."