Babette shrugged her shoulders:
“Perhaps she will marry a tradesman,” she said. “Perhaps——” She gave it up.
“And after that?”
Babette kissed Betty’s serious face:
“Thou odd inquirer,” said she. “If you ask after that and after that, why we grow old one day—and after that die—and after that are buried—and after that, who cares?”
She laughed, and stroked Betty’s hand:
“Ah, and that is Marcelle—she was apprentice to a sempstress—but the work was hard, the hours long, oh so long, and the food scarce and poor—and she has only once to live—and she has Titian red hair—she, too, came to the cafés, where the students are always gay and the lights are——”
There was a shout of laughter from the students.
Out of the riot the quavering voice of age rose in broken falsetto, singing a snatch of song that was on the town in Betty’s childhood, a soprano passage from an old Italian opera.
An old woman, with blear watery eyes, her tattered and rusty old dress hanging in an untidy bunch about her shrunken body, a few grey hairs straggling over her withered leaden face, was singing in the full operatic manner. A strange pathetic sight. So an old harpsichord sounds, awaking startled ghosts in some old-world room at the rude touch of living hands.