close neighborhood and of the Countess' conviction that I was
indifferent to women. A look would have spoilt all, and I never
allowed a thought of her to be seen in my eyes. Honorine chose to
regard me as an old friend. Her manner to me was the outcome of a kind
of pity. Her looks, her voice, her words, all showed that she was a
hundred miles away from the coquettish airs which the strictest virtue
might have allowed under such circumstances. She soon gave me the
right to go into the pretty workshop where she made her flowers, a
retreat full of books and curiosities, as smart as a boudoir where
elegance emphasized the vulgarity of the tools of her trade. The
Countess had in the course of time poetized, as I may say, a thing
which is at the antipodes to poetry--a manufacture.

"Perhaps of all the work a woman can do, the making of artificial
flowers is that of which the details allow her to display most grace.
For coloring prints she must sit bent over a table and devote herself,
with some attention, to this half painting. Embroidering tapestry, as
diligently as a woman must who is to earn her living by it, entails
consumption or curvature of the spine. Engraving music is one of the
most laborious, by the care, the minute exactitude, and the
intelligence it demands. Sewing and white embroidery do not earn
thirty sous a day. But the making of flowers and light articles of
wear necessitates a variety of movements, gestures, ideas even, which
do not take a pretty woman out of her sphere; she is still herself;
she may chat, laugh, sing, or think.

"There was certainly a feeling for art in the way in which the
Countess arranged on a long deal table the myriad-colored petals which
were used in composing the flowers she was to produce. The saucers of
color were of white china, and always clean, arranged in such order