“Well, that will not be bad,” agreed old Tricot. “While Marie (the daughter-in-law) washes the linen and you make the tarts, Mam’selle can keep the shop, but no board must she pay. I’ll be bound new customers will flock to us to buy of the pretty face.” Judy blushed with pleasure at the old peasant’s compliment.
“And thou, laggard and sloth! What will thou do while the women slave?”
“I—Oh, I will go to the Tabac’s to see what news there is, and later to see if Jean is to the front.”
“Well, we cannot hear from Jean to-day and Paris can still stand without thy political opinion,” but she laughed and shoved him from the shop, a very tender expression on her lined old face.
“These men! They think themselves of much importance,” she said as she resumed her pastry making.
Having tied a great linen apron around Judy’s slender waist (much slenderer in the last month from her economical living), and having instructed her in the prices of the cooked food displayed in the show cases, Mère Tricot turned over the shop to her care. The rosy baby was lying in a wooden cradle in the back of the little shop and the grandmother was in plain view in the tiny kitchen to be seen beyond the living room.
“Well, I fancy I am almost domesticated,” thought Judy. “What an interior this would make—baby in foreground and old Mother Tricot on through with her rolling pin. Light fine! I’ve a great mind to paint while I am keeping shop, sketch, anyhow.”
She whipped out her sketch book and sketched in her motive with sure and clever strokes, but art is long and shops must be kept. Customers began to pile in. The spinach was very popular and Judy became quite an adept in dishing it out and weighing it. Potato salad was next in demand and cooked tongue and rosbif disappeared rapidly. Many soldiers lounged in, eating their sandwiches in the shop. Judy enjoyed her morning greatly but she could not remember ever in her life having worked harder.
When the tarts were finished and displayed temptingly in the window, swarms of children arrived. It seemed that Mère Tricot’s tarts were famous in the Quarter. More soldiers came, too. Among them was a face strangely familiar to the amateur shop girl. Who could it be? It was the face of a typical Boulevardier: dissipated, ogling eyes; black moustache and beard waxed until they looked like sharp spikes; a face not homely but rather handsome, except for its expression of infinite conceit and impertinence.
“I have never seen him before, I fancy. It is just the type that is familiar to me,” she thought. “Mais quel type!”