she sweep out her floor and make her mash for the fowls, and wash out her
bit of linen and hang it to dry on a line among the tall, flaunting
hollyhocks that were so proud of themselves because they reached to the
roof.

"What do you want with books, Bébée?" said Reine, the sabot-maker's wife,
across the privet hedge, as she also hung out her linen. "Franz told me
you were reading last night. It is the silver buckles have done that: one
mischief always begets another."

"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.