A few of the lessons were given downstairs, and then Clélie preferred a request to Madame.
“If you will permit Mademoiselle to come to my room, you will confer a favor upon me,” she said.
Fortunately, her request was granted, and so I used afterward to come home and find Mademoiselle Esmeralda in our little salon at work disconsolately and tremulously. She found it difficult to hold her pencil in the correct manner, and one morning she let it drop, and burst into tears.
“Don't you see I'll never do it!” she answered, miserably. “Don't you see I couldn't, even if my heart was in it, and it aint at all!”
She held out her little hands piteously for Clélie to look at. They were well enough shaped, and would have been pretty if they had not been robbed of their youthful suppleness by labor.
“I've been used to work,” she said, “rough work all my life, and my hands aint like yours.”
“But you must not be discouraged, Mademoiselle,” said Clélie gently. “Time”—
“Time,” interposed the girl, with a frightened look in her pretty gray eyes. “That's what I can't bear to think of—the time that's to come.”
This was the first of many outbursts of confidence. Afterward she related to Clélie, with the greatest naïveté, the whole history of the family affairs.
They had been the possessors of some barren mountain lands in North Carolina, and her description of their former life was wonderful indeed to the ears of the Parisian. She herself had been brought up with marvelous simplicity and hardihood, barely learning to read and write, and in absolute ignorance of society. A year ago iron had been discovered upon their property, and the result had been wealth and misery for father and daughter. The mother, who had some vague fancies of the attractions of the great outside world, was ambitious and restless. Monsieur, who was a mild and accommodating person, could only give way before her stronger will.