“But a thing is only what it seems,” she said, with naive protest.
“I grant you it is good philosophy but not all philosophy is truth.”
There was a comical expression on his face as he uttered the last, and she looked puzzled. A bit of shyness came over her.
“So you can’t guess where I come from,” he said, looking tenderly at her. Then he added, as if speaking to himself, “I come from a country where they wish I had come from another country, and if I had come from another country they would have wished the same.”
He threw his head back and laughed but not without a touch of bitterness in his tone.
She did not understand him. There was perplexity in the girl’s face. No one had ever looked at her in this manner. There was something beseeching in his half-closed eyes, something eloquently covetous, and he gazed at her as if she were an inanimate thing, a picture or statue of the masters in the Louvre.
His next question sounded still more puzzling. Was she always in the shop? What a question! She was either in the shop or in the rear helping with the housework. Her employer was not boarding her and paying her mother ten francs a month for nothing!
As he was leaving he suddenly turned around and asked her name. “Marguerite,” she told him. He said he would like to be her Faust.
She looked at him incomprehensively and said, “Vous êtes drôle.”
“You are not the only one who thinks me funny,” he replied.