"How happy I should be to have one. When you have an over-abundance of flowers don't forget me."
"Poor Mademoiselle Virtud," said Paula one day, "I am sure she has some secret burden."
"Nobody likes her," I said. (I remembered that I had twenty-five lines to copy because I had talked all the afternoon.)
"God loves her!"
"And you?" I questioned.
"Oh, certainly," said Paula.
"Notwithstanding she is so disagreeable?"
"I do not know. We don't know her outside of school."
"And I don't want to know her. As for you, you love everybody that nobody else loves." And that was true: Paula was always the friend of the poor and the despised. In that great school which was a world in miniature, there were many unfortunate little ones who suffered neglect from their drunken parents; others were cruelly treated at home, and in the case of still others, their timidity or physical weakness exposed them to the ridicule of their comrades. In Paula, however, they all found a friend and a companion who loved them and defended them.
The capacity to love and to make others happy, extended itself also to the animals, but not to those small boys who destroyed the birds' nests or threw stones at the horses or dogs—these she attacked without mercy. In the neighborhood of "The Convent" where we lived, there were quite a number of this type of boy whose greatest pleasure was to torture the dogs and cats. One of these especially, the son of the "Breton," was a veritable executioner. He never attended school, for his father never bothered with him, and his mother, poor woman, accustomed to misery and the blows of her drunken husband, had apparently lost all semblance of human feeling. This boy spent his time tormenting anything or anybody who was unable to resist him—old men, sick people, little children, and especially dumb animals.