Patricia yawned; Vivette was rather tiresome with her English.
“‘Fleet’ will do,” she said. “She’s that too. No, I can’t explain: I’m busy, Vivette.”
“Bee-sy? Like a bee, is that, Patricia? Trés occupée, n’est-ce pas?”
“It does; and if you don’t go away, Vivette, I’ll show you with a hatpin what a bee does!”
“Tiens!” murmured Vivette; “none the less, ‘Moriole’ is pretty, and far more facile to say than ‘Honor’!”
That was how Honor came to be called “Moriole” among the girls; the name clung long after the black dress had been laid aside.
Two years passed; years of calm, peaceful, happy days. Two years of study in the gray classroom, with its desks and blackboards, and its estrade where Madame Madeleine or Soeur Séraphine sat benevolently watching, knitting or rosary in hand, ready to encourage or reprove, as need should arise. They were sisters, the two ladies of the Pension Madeleine, though, as the girls often said, no one would have thought it. Madame Madeleine was the elder by many years. She was more like a robin than one would have thought a person could be; round and rosy, with bright black eyes and a nose as sharp as a robin’s bill. She wore black always, with a little white knitted shoulder shawl; and flat shoes of black cloth which she made herself, no one knew why.
Soeur Séraphine was slender and beautiful, so beautiful in her gray dress and white coif, that every new girl longed to dress like her, and all the girls made up romances about her, no one of which was true. Both ladies were “good as bread,” and everybody loved them, even people who loved no one else; old Cruchon, the milkman, for example, who announced boldly that he hated all human kind.
Two years of récreation in the garden, with its high box hedges, and its brick-paved alleys from which the girls were set once a week to remove the weeds and mosses that came sprouting up between the small bright red bricks. (Thus they learned, Madame would explain, the ceaseless industry and perseverance of Nature, overcoming every obstacle; besides strengthening the muscles of the back in a manner altogether special.)