She kept up a brisk correspondence with "_Madame la Baronne de Rothschild_," whose sole mission in life she apparently believed was to see her out of her difficulties. _La Baronne_, on one occasion, gave her a sovereign, Heaven knows why, unless as a desperate measure to close the correspondence; but a good part of it went in postage for letters representing why the bestowal of sovereigns upon Clementine should become habitual. Stray agents, presumably from _la Baronne_, would pay me mysterious visits, to ask if Clementine were a deserving object of benevolence, and I was exposed to repeated cross-examination in her regard. She made a point of learning the hours when the _chefs_ left the kitchens of the big hotels and restaurants near the _Quartier_, and also of finding out who among them might be looked to for a few odd pence for the sake of Ernest's father, at one time a washer of dishes, or who, after a _coup de vin_ or an _absinthe_, grew generous with their money. She had gauged the depth of every tender heart in the _Quartier_ and the possibility of scraps and broken meats at every shop and eating-place. And no one understood better how to beg, how to turn on the limelight and bring out in melodramatic relief the enormity of her need and destitution. The lisping treble, the giggle, the tattered clothes, _la vieille grandmere_, the desertion of the little Ernest's father, the little Ernest himself, were so many valuable assets. Indeed, she appreciated the value of the little Ernest so well that once she would have had me multiply him by twelve when she asked me to vouch for her poverty before some new society disposed to be friendly. If luck went against her, and nothing came of her begging, she was not discouraged. Begging was a game of chance with her,--her Monte Carlo or Little Horses,--and she never murmured over her failures, but with her faculty for making the best of all things, she got amusement out of them as well as out of her successes.