(Still the same trick of avoiding an exact accounting! It might as well have been last evening as last year!)
"What happened?"
"The same riling that happens every year (just as in Malbrough . . . "sà Paques ou à la Trinité . . ."): The dead season comes immediately after the Grand-Prix. The employers all back the wrong horse, so as to have a generous excuse for giving us the gate."
"But where are you then?"
"Oh, I'm here and there. I run about and do a little bit of everything."
Annette was in consternation.
"Then you haven't any job, and you didn't tell me!"
With a little air of superiority, Sylvie explained (at heart not at all displeased by the emotion she had produced) that she slapped together cheap costumes for others to finish, hemmed little dresses, and sewed up men's trousers. And she made a great joke of it all in the telling. But Annette did not laugh. Pressing her inquiry further, she found that her sister was at her wits' end to find work and that she sometimes accepted tasks that were overtiring and disheartening. Now she understood why Sylvie had seemed pale "for some time"; why she had not come to see her for a number of days, offering feeble excuses and absurd lies, in order, no doubt, to spend a part of the night wearing out her fingers and her eyes in sewing. Sylvie, in her joking tone of affected indifference, continued to recount her little misadventures. But she saw that her sister's lips were trembling with anger. And, abruptly, Annette burst out:
"No! It's shameful! I can't, I simply can't bear it! What! you say you love me, and you yourself wanted us to be friends, you pretend to be one, and then you hide from me the most serious things that concern you! . . ."
Sylvie's curled lip said, "Pshaw! What of it! . . ." But Annette did not let her speak; the torrent was loosed.