He was a slick, slim youth named Jean, with a soapy blond lock plastered under the visor of his leather cap pulled down to his red ears. On fête days, he wore in addition a scarlet neck-tie girdling his scrawny throat. He had watched Yvonne for a long time, very much as the snake in the fable saved the young dove until it was grown.
And so, Yvonne grew to dreaming while the cows strayed. Once the Père Bourron struck at her with a spade for her negligence, but missed. Another night he beat her soundly for letting a cow get stalled in the mud. The days on the marsh now became interminable, for he worked for Gavelle, the carpenter, a good three kilomètres back of Pont du Sable and the two could see each other only on fête days when he met her secretly among the dunes or in the evenings near the farm. He would wait for her then at the edge of the woods skirting the misty sea of pasture that spread out below the farm like some vast and silent dry lake, dotted here and there with groups of sleeping cattle.
She saw Marianne but seldom now, for the latter fished mostly at the Three Wolves, sharing her catch with a crew of eight fishermen. Often they would seine the edge of the coast, their boat dancing off beyond the breakers while they netted the shallow water, swishing up the hard beach—these gamblers of the sea. They worked with skill and precision, each one having his share to do, while one—the quickest—was appointed to carry their bundle of dry clothes rolled in a tarpaulin.
Marianne seemed of casual importance to her now. We seldom think of our best friends in time of love. Yvonne cried for his kisses which at first she did not wholly understand, but which she grew to hunger for, just as when she was little she craved for all she wanted to eat for once—and candy.
She began to think of herself, too—of Jean's scarlet cravat—of his new shoes too tight for him, which he wore with the pride of a village dandy on fête days and Sundays—and of her own patched and pitifully scanty wardrobe.
"She has nothing, that little one," she had heard the gossips remark openly before her, time and time again, when she was a child. Now that she was budding into womanhood and was physically twice as strong as Jean, now that she was conscious of herself, she began to know the pangs of vanity.
It was about this time that she bought the ribbon, just as Marianne had foretold, a red ribbon to match Jean's tie, and which she fashioned into a bow and kept in a paper box, well hidden in the straw of her bed. The patched skirt had long ago grown too short, and was now stuffed into a broken window beyond the cow manger to temper the draught from the neck of a sick bull.
She wore now, when it stormed, thick woollen stockings and sabots; and another skirt of the Mère Bourron's fastened around a chemise of coarse homespun linen, its colour faded to a delicious pale mazarine blue, showing the strength and fullness of her body.
She had stolen down from the loft this night to meet him at the edge of the woods.