Martha said nothing to her mother and sisters of her encounter with the princess. She had a way of locking very close in her heart her most personal and sacred feelings, and all that related to the princess was sacred to her now. During her earlier years she had so often been laughed at for an enthusiast that she had learned to keep back what she felt most strongly; and for that very reason, perhaps, the intensity of her feelings grew greater as she grew older. The enthusiasm of her life was for her only brother, whom she worshiped with a blind idolatry of the extent of which even he was unaware. There had been one or two other divinities in her horizon, always second to Harold; but at this period of her life she was suffering from a sense of disappointment in these as, one after the other, they had come short of her ardent expectations. She was now, therefore, in the exact state of mind to take on a new object of worship. This the princess had become.
It was not surprising that Martha’s ideal had been so repeatedly unrealized, for it was a difficult one. She had suffered acutely from her former disappointments, and had even resolved never to pin her faith and hope on another woman. But the princess was not to be resisted. Martha felt that even if her goddess never spoke to her again, she was worthy of all adoration.
As the young girl drove through the streets of Paris in the early morning of the day following her brief interview with the princess, her heart was very happy.
In appearance Martha was small and rather plain; and no one would have noticed her, perhaps, but for the concentration of expression on her face as she looked out of the carriage window on her way to her atelier in the Latin Quarter. The people abroad at that hour were not of a class to pay much attention to such a look on a girl’s face. The little army of street-cleaners, occupying their brief hour with busy industry to produce the beautiful effect of gay cleanliness which the world enjoyed later in the day, had no time to notice Martha, and she was as unaware of them. Even the ice on the figures in the fountains of the Place de la Concorde, which she generally admired in passing, she did not so much as see to-day. The “cold sea-maidens” wore an unusually beautiful veil of mist, made by the freezing spray, and Martha might have got an impression for some future picture if she had studied it with the early sunlight on it.
But she was thinking only of the princess as she drove along and crossed the bridge and entered old Paris. Here, too, all was familiar, for Martha had taken this drive daily for months, and there was nothing to disturb her preoccupation until she reached the Invalides, where her hero-worshiping soul never failed to offer a passing tribute of awe to the ashes of Napoleon.
As she turned into a cross street farther on, a little funeral procession met her. This sight, too, was familiar; but no wont and usage could keep Martha from being deeply moved as often as she witnessed the pitiful little ceremonial which attends the burial of the very poor in Paris.
It is usually in the early morning that these funerals occur, as there seems to be a demand upon the poor to give up to the more prosperous even the space in the streets which they, with their dead, lay claim to for so short a time. This was a child’s funeral, or, rather, it was the funeral of two children. There was neither hearse nor carriage. Each little coffin was borne upon a wretched bier carried by rough and shabby men, who appeared cross and reluctant in their miserable, faded trappings of mourning. Looking carefully, Martha discovered that there was a separate family of mourners to each little bier; and as the whole procession was under the command of a tall old man, who held his shoulders very erect, as if to atone for a limp in one leg, she comprehended that this bedizened old undertaker, with the ragged crape on his cocked hat and the dirty bunches of black and white ribbons on the end of his long staff of office, had consolidated his duties, probably at a slight and very welcome discount to his poor patrons, and was burying the dead of two families at once. Directly after him came the bearers of the light coffin, and just behind it were five little children, four girls and a boy, walking abreast, and dressed in mourning. This mourning consisted of hastily fashioned aprons made of dull black calico, and so carelessly fitted that the many-colored undergarments of the children showed plainly at every opening. The children were regular little steps, the boy being the youngest; and cold as it was, they were all bareheaded. Each carried a sprig of yellow bloom, which resembled, if indeed it was not, the mustard-flower. This they held very stiffly and correctly in their right hands, and they walked with an air of the utmost decorum. Behind them came their father and mother, the former looking more apathetic than sad, and the latter carrying with some complacency the dignity of a dingy and draggled crape veil, in frank contrast to a blue-and-green plaid dress. She was taller than her husband, and leaned awkwardly upon his arm, keeping no time whatever to his shuffling gait. Then came the other coffin and the second group of mourners, who were evidently not so fashionable as the first; for they made no effort at mourning, and walked after their little dead one with nothing like a flower, and in their common working-clothes.
While Martha’s carriage was passing this
