“Ah no, madame, all that is long finished,” replied Madame Querterot, “but since then I have been obliged to provide for her education, and every year she has become more expensive. Now she is eighteen, and you would imagine her anxious to repay some of the expense and ennuis she has caused me during all these years.”
“Yes, no doubt,” agreed Mrs. Vanderstein, “she will be a great help to you now.”
“So one would think. But figure to yourself, madame, what this young girl proposes to me to do with her life. She desires to enter a convent and to spend her days in good works rather than be of assistance to her mother!” and Madame Querterot laughed bitterly.
“I think she ought not to take such a decisive step at present,” said Mrs. Vanderstein; “at the age of eighteen she can hardly know if a religious life is really her vocation.”
“She is obstinate like a donkey, madame. Just think of it, a young girl, healthy, not ugly; already she has had offers of marriage. There is a young man, very bien, very comme il faut, who demands her hand and who thinks of nothing but her. But will she take him? No. Not at all. We prefer to be a religious; and voilà!”
Madame Querterot, having finished her massaging, was repacking the brown bag in which she had brought her apparatus.
“I hope that you will amuse yourself at the opera, madame,” she went on, folding her apron and laying it on top of the other things in the bag, the lock of which clicked as she shut it down with an impatient snap.
“A demain, mesdames,” she concluded, taking up the bag by the handle and giving it a shake as if she only wished she could so shake her unsatisfactory child. “A cette heure-ci, n’est-ce pas?”
And with that she bowed herself from the room.