“I advise you not to tell it to Mademoiselle; she’s quite in the old ideas,” Madame Poupin suggested to Hyacinth, tasting her tisane.
Hyacinth sat baffled and wondering, looking from his fellow-labourer in Soho to his new acquaintance opposite. “If you’ve some plan, something to which one can give one’s self, I think you might have told me,” he remarked in a moment to Poupin.
The latter merely viewed him a little as if he were a pleasing object and then said to the strange young man: “He’s a little jealous of you. But there’s no harm in that; it’s of his age. You must know him, you must like him. We’ll tell you his history some other day; it will make you feel that he belongs to us of necessity. It’s an accident that he hasn’t met you here before.”
“How could ces messieurs have met when M. Paul never comes? He doesn’t spoil us!” Madame Poupin cried.
“Well, you see I’ve my little sister at home to take care of when I ain’t at the works,” M. Paul explained. “This afternoon it was just a chance; there was a lady we know came in to sit with her.”
“A lady—a real lady?”
“Oh yes, every inch,” smiled M. Paul.
“Do you like them to thrust themselves into your apartment like that because you’ve the désagrément of being poor? It seems to be the custom in this country, but it wouldn’t suit me at all,” Madame Poupin continued. “I should like to see one of ces dames—the real ones—coming in to sit with me!”
“Oh, you’re not a cripple; you’ve got the use of your legs!”
“Yes, and of my arms!” cried the Frenchwoman.