surrounded by the people she had known from infancy, and an insult to her
would have been answered by a stroke from the cobbler's strap or from the
tinker's hammer. There was one girl only who ever tried to do her any
harm--a good-looking stout wench, who stood at the corner of the Montagne
de la Cour with a stall of fruit in the summer time, and in winter time
drove a milk cart over the snow. This girl would get at her sometimes,
and talk of the students, and tell her how good it was to get out of the
town on a holiday, and go to any one of the villages where there was
Kermesse and dance, and drink the little blue wine, and have trinkets
bought for one, and come home in the moonlight in a char-à-banc, with the
horns sounding, and the lads singing, and the ribbons flying from the
old horse's ears.

"She is such a little close sly thing!" thought the fruit girl, sulkily.
To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

"We dance almost every evening, the children and I," Bébée had
answered when urged fifty times by this girl to go to fairs, and balls at
the wine shops. "That does just as well. And I have seen Kermesse once at
Malines--it was beautiful. I went with Mère Dax, but it cost a great deal
I know, though she did not let me pay."

"You little fool!" the fruit girl would say, and grin, and eat a pear.

But the good honest old women who sat about in the Grande Place, hearing,
had always taken the fruit girl to task, when they got her by herself.

"Leave the child alone, you mischievous one," said they. "Be content with
being base yourself. Look you, Lisette; she is not one like you to make
eyes at the law students, and pester the painter lads for a day's outing.