(What a bore! . . . Tootle-too-too! . . . They have plenty of time to waste! . . .)
"And you," Annette would ask, "what do you think of it, Sylvie?"
("Piffle!" thought Sylvie.)
"I think the same as you do, dear."
This in no wise prevented them from adoring each other; but at the same time it somewhat hampered their conversation.
And what could they do with their days, alone in the sombre house by the edge of the woods, confronted by stripped fields, under a low autumn sky that mingled with the bare plain in the fog? In vain had Sylvie asserted and believed that she adored the country; she had soon exhausted its pleasures, and in the country she was idle, out of place, lost. . . . Nature, nature. . . . Let us be frank! Nature bored her. . . . A land of rustics! No! She could not bear the little inclemencies: wind, rain, mud (the mud of Paris, in comparison, seemed pleasant to her), the mice trotting up and down behind old partitions, the spiders who came indoors to take up their winter quarters, and those frightful beasts, the buzzing mosquitoes, who regaled themselves on her wrists and ankles. She could have wept with irritation and boredom. Annette, rejoicing in the open air and in the solitude with her beloved sister, invulnerable to boredom, laughing at mosquito bites, tried to drag Sylvie along on her muddy walks, without noticing her sullen, disgusted expression. A gust of wind and rain intoxicated her; forgetting Sylvie, she would set off with great strides over the plowed earth or through the woods, shaking the wet branches; and it was not until long after that she remembered the little straggler. And Sylvie, who was sulking and piteously examining her swollen face, would wait vainly, thinking:
"When are we going back?"
But among the thousand and one desires of the younger Rivière girl, there was one that was good and praiseworthy, that nothing could alter, and the country air served only to lend it new lustre. She loved her trade. She really loved it. Of good Parisian working stock, work was necessary to her; she needed her needle and her thimble to busy her fingers and her thoughts. She had an innate love of sewing; it was a physical pleasure for her to spend hours handling some piece of material, a dainty fabric, a silk muslin, folding it, gathering it, giving a touch to a knot of ribbons. And then her little noddle, which did not flatter itself, Heaven be praised, that it understood the ideas lodged in Annette's big brain, knew that here in her own domain, in the kingdom of chiffons, she had ideas too, enough and to spare. . . . Well then, could she give up her ideas? It is thought that a woman can enjoy no greater pleasure than to wear pretty dresses! . . . For a really gifted woman it is a much greater pleasure to make them. And once one has tasted this pleasure, one cannot forego it. In the downy idleness in which her sister kept her, while Annette was running her hands over the piano keys, Sylvie felt homesick for the noise of big shears and the sewing machine. All the works of art in the world, had they been offered to her, would not have made up for the fine, headless dummy that one can drape according to one's fancy, that one can twist and turn, before which one squats, that one slyly maltreats, and that one takes in one's arms for a dance when the forewoman is absent. A few casual words sufficiently indicated the drift of her thoughts; and impatient Annette, seeing her eyes light up, knew that she was in for another story of the shop.
So when Sylvie announced, after their return to Paris, that she was going back to her lodging and her regular work, Annette sighed; but she was not surprised. Sylvie, who had expected opposition, was much more touched by this sigh, by this silence, than she would have been by any words. She ran to her seated sister, and, kneeling before her, she clasped her arms around her waist and held her mouth up to her.
"Annette, don't be angry with me!"