The one in which we all took the most interest lived just across the
street from me, and by looking up a little you could see her looking
out of her window, with her thick, heavy black hair bound in bandeaux
across her forehead, and a great diamond horseshoe pinned at her
throat, and with just a touch of white powder showing on her nose and
cheeks. She looked as though she should have lived by rights in the
Faubourg St.-Germain, and she used to smile down rather kindly upon
the street with a haughty, tolerant look, as if it amused her by its
simplicity and idleness, and by the quietness, which only the cries
of the children or of the hucksters, or the cracking at times of a
coachman's whip, ever broke. She looked very well then, but it was in
the morning that the street saw her at her best. For it was then that
she went out to ride in the Bois in her Whitechapel cart, and as she
never awoke in time, apparently, we had the satisfaction of watching
the pony and the tiger and cart for an hour or two until she came. It
was a brown basket-cart, and the tiger used to walk around it many
times to see that it had not changed in any particular since he had
examined it three minutes before, and the air with which he did this
gave us an excellent idea of the responsibility of his position. So
that people passing stopped and looked too--bakers' boys in white linen
caps and with baskets on their arms, and commissionnaires in cocked
hats and portfolios chained to their persons, and gentlemen freshly
made up for the morning, with waxed mustaches and flat-brimmed high
hats, and little girls with plaits, and little boys with bare legs; and
all of us in-doors, as soon as we heard the pony stamp his sharp hoofs
on the asphalt, would drop books or razors or brooms or mops and wait
patiently at the window until she came.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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