"Where is the mischief, good Reine?" said Bébée, who was always prettily behaved with her elders, though, when pushed to it, she could hold her own.
"The mischief will be in discontent," said the sabot-maker's wife. "People live on their own little patch, and think it is the world; that is as it should be—everybody within his own, like a nut in its shell. But when you get reading, you hear of a swarm of things you never saw, and you fret because you cannot see them, and you dream, and dream, and a hole is burnt in your soup-pot, and your dough is as heavy as lead. You are like bees that leave their own clover fields to buzz themselves dead against the glass of a hothouse."
Bébée smiled, reaching to spread out her linen. But she said nothing.
"What good is it talking to them?" she thought; "they do not know."
Already the neighbors and friends of her infancy seemed so far, far away; creatures of a distant world, that she had long left; it was no use talking, they never would understand.
"Antoine should never have taught you your letters," said Reine, groaning under the great blue shirts she was hanging on high among the leaves. "I told him so at the time. I said, 'The child is a good child, and spins, and sews, and sweeps, rare and fine for her age; why go and spoil her?' But he was always headstrong. Not a child of mine knows a letter, the saints be praised! nor a word of any tongue but our own good Flemish. You should have been brought up the same. You would have come to no trouble then."
"I am in no trouble, dear Reine," said Bébée, scattering the potato-peels to the clacking poultry, and she smiled into the faces of the golden oxlips that nodded to her back again in sunshiny sympathy.
"Not yet," said Reine, hanging her last shirt.
But Bébée was not hearing; she was calling the chickens, and telling the oxlips how pretty they looked in the borders; and in her heart she was counting the minutes till the old Dutch cuckoo-clock at Mère Krebs's—the only clock in the lane—should crow out the hour at which she went down to the city.
She loved the hut, the birds, the flowers; but they were little to her now compared with the dark golden picturesque square, the changing crowds, the frowning roofs, the gray stones, and colors and shadows of the throngs for one face and for one smile.