Germinie was forever wiping eyes which no longer wept, but which had once wept copiously. She was always ready with an everlasting: "Nothing's the matter, mademoiselle!" uttered in the tone that covers a secret. She adopted dumb, despairing, funereal attitudes, the airs by which a woman's body diffuses melancholy and makes her very shadow a bore. With her face, her glance, her mouth, the folds of her dress, her presence, the noise she made at work in the adjoining room, even with her silence, she enveloped mademoiselle in the despair that exhaled from her person. At the slightest word she would bristle up. Mademoiselle could not address an observation to her, ask her the most trivial question, give her an order or express a wish: everything was taken by her as a reproach. And thereupon she would act like a madwoman. She would wipe her eyes and grumble: "Oh! I am very unfortunate! I can see that mademoiselle doesn't care for me any more!" Her spite against various people vented itself in sublimely ingenious complaints. "That woman always comes when it rains!" she would say, upon discovering a bit of mud that Madame de Belleuse had left on the carpet. During the week following New Year's Day, the week when all of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's remaining relatives and friends, rich and poor alike, climbed the five flights and waited on the landing at her door for their turns to occupy the six chairs in her bedroom, Germinie redoubled her ill-humor, her impertinent remarks, her sulky muttering. Inventing grievances against her mistress, she punished her constantly by a persistent silence, which it was impossible to break. Then there would be periods of frenzied industry. Mademoiselle would hear through the partitions on all sides furious manipulation of the broom and duster, the sharp, vicious scrubbing and slamming of the servant whom one imagines muttering to herself as she maltreats the furniture: "Oh! yes, I'll do your work for you!" Old people are patient with servants who have been long in their service. Long habit, the weakening will-power, the horror of change, the dread of new faces,--everything disposes them to weakness and cowardly concessions. Notwithstanding her quick temper, her promptness to lose her head, to fly into a rage, to breathe fire and flame, mademoiselle said nothing. She acted as if she saw nothing. She pretended to be reading when Germinie entered the room. She waited, curled up in her easy-chair, until the maid's ill-humor had blown over or burst. She bent her back before the storm; she said no word, had no thought of bitterness against her. She simply pitied her for causing herself so much suffering.