Presently, tired of her play, she came to stand by her mother's knee, laying her head against it.
'Mon petit ange! que tu es gentille!' said the mother in a low, rapid voice, pressing her hand on the child's cheek. Then, turning back to David, she chattered on about the profit and loss of married life. All that she said was steeped in prose—in the prose especially of sous and francs; she talked of rents, of the price of food, of the state of wages in her husband's trade. Yet every here and there came an exquisite word, a flash. It seemed that she had been very ill with her first child. She did not mince matters much even with this young man, and David gathered that she had not only been near dying, but that her illness had made a moral epoch in her life. She was laid by for three months; work was slack for her husband; her own earnings, for she was a skilled embroideress working for a great linen-shop in the Rue Vivienne, were no longer forthcoming. Would her husband put up with it, with the worries of the baby, and the menage, and the sick wife, and that sharp pinch of want into the bargain, from which during two years she had completely protected him?
'I cried one day,' she said simply; 'I said to him, "You're just sick of it, ain't you? Well, I'm going to die. Go and shift for yourself, and take the baby to the Enfants Trouves. Alors—"'
She paused, her homely face gently lit up from within. 'He is not a man of words—Jules. He told me to be quiet, called me petite sotte. "Haven't you slaved for two years?" he said. "Well, then, lie still, can't you?—faut bien que chacun prenne son tour!"'
She broke off, smiling and shaking her head. Then glancing round upon her companion again, she resumed her motherly sermon. That was the good of being married; that there was some one to share the bad times with, as well as the good.
'But perhaps,' she inquired briskly, 'you don't believe in being married? You are for l'union libre?'
She spoke like one touching on a long familiar question—as much a question indeed of daily life and of her class as those other matters of wages and food she had been discussing.
A slow and painful red mounted into the Englishman's cheek.
'I don't know,' he said stupidly. 'And you?'
'No, no!' she said emphatically, twice, nodding her head. 'Oh, I was brought up that way. My father was a Red—an Anarchist—a great man among them; he died last year. He said that liberty was everything. It made him mad when any of his friends accepted l'union légale—for him it was a treason. He never married my mother, though he was faithful to her all his life. But for me—' she paused, shaking her head slowly. 'Well, I had an elder sister—that says everything. Faut pas en parler; it makes melancholy, and one must keep up one's spirits when one is like this. It is three years since she died; she was my father's favourite. When they buried her—she died in the hospital—I sat down and thought a little. It was abominable what she had suffered, and I said to myself, "Why?"'