“How much?” inquired Garnier, with the air of a judge.
“Ten francs.”
“That settles it. We will go to the Tobacco-Pot. Ten francs, and this is Saturday! Mon Dieu, what a Rothschild you must be! Where did you get your money from?”
“My father.”
“What is he?”
“He keeps a shop.”
“Happy for you. You can paint away, and the old bird feeds you. Oh, I should like a shop—a little shop, where I would sell sweets and cigarettes, and live in my shirt-sleeves, and read the Ami du Peuple and kick my heels.”
“What do you think of my work?” asked Toto, glancing at the mediocre drawing upon his canvas.
“It’s capital,” said Garnier, his mind running on his little shop, where children would toddle in with their sou for sugar-sticks, and old women totter in for hap’orths of snuff: for, though Garnier loved all humanity, he perhaps loved the two extremes, childhood and old age, most.