Young girls came and asked her opinion about getting married; women came and enlarged upon their domestic quarrels; others came and told her things that bewildered her. All these problems, all these cases of conscience Mme. Armand, la Bonne Demoiselle, solved with her innocence, the innocence of a child that, knowing nothing, knows more than they who know everything.
One evening, Adèle brought her housekeeping-book. Gilberte gravely added the column and initialed it.
“But madame is not even looking to see what I bought and how much I paid.”
Gilberte blushed:
“You see.... I don’t know much about it.... So I leave it to you.... Besides, I have no reason to suspect you....”
There must have been something in the tone of her words, something special in her air and attitude; at any rate, the old woman was seized with extraordinary excitement, and, flinging herself on her knees before her mistress, cried:
“Oh, it’s a shame to cheat a person like you, ma’am! I can have no heart at all, nor my great rascal of a Bouquetot either!... Why, you must be an angel from Heaven not to see that everybody’s robbing you: the grocer, the baker, the butcher, and I most of all!... Just look at my book: a bunch of carrots, thirty sous; a wretched chicken, six francs fifteen sous....”
She emptied her purse on the table:
“There! Fifty or sixty francs I’ve done you out of, all in one month!... But I stopped the other day, I couldn’t do it, it broke my heart to see you like that, so trusting....”
“My poor Adèle,” whispered Gilberte, greatly moved.