“Poor Georget! what a miserable trade yours is! Knowing how to write and figure as you do, you ought to have found a place in some office, or a clerkship in some shop.”
“Oh, yes! and wait a year or two before earning any kind of a salary! Don’t think about that any more, mother; I am very happy as I am! A clerk! shut up all day in an office! oh! how sick I should get of that! then I should never see her!”
“Who is it that you’d never see, my child?”
Georget blushed, but made haste to reply:
“I mean that I shouldn’t see you during the day, whenever I wanted to. By the way, mother, I must go to see the gentleman on the third floor, the gentleman who is so kind, although he doesn’t show it. I am going to return his twenty francs.”
“Isn’t it a little too early? He isn’t up yet, probably.”
“Oh! I am very sure that he gets up early; he isn’t one of the kind to coddle himself. Anyway, I’ll ask his valet, that mulatto who’s such a strange creature, they say.”
“Go, my dear, and thank the gentleman from me, until I can do it myself.”
Georget cast a glance at the mirror to make sure that nothing was lacking in his costume. When a man is in love, he becomes particular about his looks, and Georget would have been very glad to please the pretty flower girl of the Château d’Eau, who seemed to look upon him as a child; that distressed the poor boy, he was sorry that he was not at least twenty years old, because he thought that then she would pay more attention to him. For we are never content with the passage of time; when we are young, we think that it doesn’t move fast enough; later, we complain because it moves too fast. And yet we know that the wisest course is to take it as it comes; probably we are not often wise, as we are always growling about it.
Georget went down to the third floor, and rang softly at Monsieur Malberg’s door; a very dark mulatto, whose hair age had not yet turned white, and who spoke French very well for a colored man, and very ill for a Parisian, opened the door and recognized the young messenger whom he had met sometimes on the stairs.