But if he was off hers, she was more than ever on mine. He gave her a perpetual subject of conversation. There were days when I seemed to hear her prattling in the kitchen from the moment she came until the moment she left, and to a good deal of her prattle I had to listen. She made it her duty to report his progress to me, and the trouble was that she could never get through without confiding far more about her own, in the past as in the present. She might begin innocently with the fit of his new clothes, but as likely as not she would end with revelations of unspeakable horror. At least I could not find fault with Clementine's confidences for their mildness or monotony. In her high, shrill, lisping treble, as if she were reciting a lesson, and with the air of a naughty girl trying to keep back her giggles, she would tell me the most appalling details of her life. I had not dreamed that out of Zola or Defoe a woman could go through such adventures, or that, if she could, it would be possible for her to emerge a harmless charwoman doing the commonplace work of a household which I flatter myself is respectable, for a few shillings a week. Of poverty, of evil, of shame, of disgrace, there was nothing she had not known; and yet as I saw her busy and happy over her scrubbing and washing and polishing in our chambers, I could have believed she had never done anything less guileless in all her thirty years. She had a curiously impersonal way of relating these adventures, as if they were no concern of hers whatever. The most dramatic situations seemed to have touched her as little as the every-day events in her sordid struggle for bread, though she was not without some pride in the variety of her experience. When Augustine warned her that her idleness was preparing for her a bed on the Embankment and daily food in a soup-kitchen, "_Eh bien?_ why not?" she giggled; "I have been on the streets, I have been in prison, I have been in the workhouse, I have seen everything--_j'ai tout vu, moi!_ Why not that too?" With her, there was no shrinking from the workhouse, as with the respectable poor, "_Ce n'est pas fait pour les chiens_," she reasoned, and looked upon it as an asylum held in reserve. Her boast that she had seen everything was no exaggeration, her everything meaning the hideous side of life which those who see only the other try so hard to shut their eyes to. "What would you have?" she asked me more than once, "I was a bastard and a foundling"; as if with such a beginning, it would have been an inconsistency on her part to turn out any better than she was. That she had started life as a little lost package of humanity, left at the door of a house for _les enfants trouves_ not far from Boulogne, never caused her shame and regret. From a visit paid by her mother to the Institution during her infancy, there could remain no doubt of her illegitimacy, but it was a source of pleasure to her, and also of much agreeable speculation.