XIX
Paul watched Manon arrange all this merchandise of hers upon the table, the yellow oranges, the blue linen trousers, and the white and blue striped shirt, the tobacco, matches, and candles, the old brown-covered dictionary, the fresh greens from Veuve Castener’s garden, the slices of cooked meat wrapped up in a page of Le Petit Journal. It was a wonderful bundle that she had carried from Ste. Claire, and Brent was touched by all the little things that she had troubled to remember. After those three days of separation this visit of hers to Beaucourt with this weight of good human stuff on her sturdy shoulders seemed to give to their partnership an essential French and intimate solidity. Brent felt that he mattered to Manon. She had shopped for him, and shouldered the merchandise ten miles. A shallow man would have felt flattered, but to Brent it brought a sense of warmth to the heart.
“Manon?”
She looked up, smiling.
“We are going to argue again as we argued over the tobacco.”
“Oh, very well,” she said with a little gleam of her brown eyes.
She felt in the pocket of her skirt for her purse, opened it with serious deliberation, and picked out a few francs and some paper money. She unfolded the notes, one of fifty francs, two of ten, and three of five, and spread them on the table, putting an orange on each to keep them from blowing away.
“We are going to be very business-like. Let us see; I suppose you are working here at least ten hours a day, and I can afford to pay you a franc an hour. Five days of ten hours makes fifty francs. So I begin by paying you fifty francs.”
She held out the fifty-franc note to him, but Paul made no effort to take it.
She pretended to be surprised.