Unfortunately for me, I had not her callousness or philosophy,--I am not yet quite sure which it was,--and if she would not think for herself, I was the more disturbed by the necessity of thinking for her. It was an absurd position. There I was, positively growing grey in my endeavours to drag her up out of the abyss of poverty into which she had sunk, and there she was, cheerful and happy, if she could only continue to enjoy _la bonne cuisine de Madame_. I never knew her to make the slightest attempt to profit by what I, or anyone else, would do for her. I remember, when _Madame la Baronne_ sent her the sovereign, she stayed at home a week, and then wrote to me as her excuse, "_J'ai ete rentiere toute la semaine. Maintenant je n'ai plus un penny, il faut m'occuper du travail._" I had not taken her things out of pawn before they were pawned again, and the cast-off clothes she begged from me followed as promptly. Her little Ernest, after all my trouble, stayed at the convent six weeks,--the month I paid for and two weeks that Clementine somehow wheedled out of the sisters,--and then he was back as of old, picking up his education in the London streets. I presented her once with a good bed I had no more use for, and, to make space for it, she went into debt and moved from her one room near Tottenham Court Road to two rooms and a higher rent near the Lower Marsh, and was robbed on the way by the man she hired to move her. When she broke anything, and she frequently did, she was never perturbed: "_Madame est forte pour payer_," or "_l'argent est fait pour rouler_," was her usual answer to my reproaches. To try to show her the road to economy was to plunge her into fresh extravagance. Nor did I advance matters by talking to her seriously. I recall one special effort to impress upon her the great misery she was preparing for herself by her shiftlessness. I had given her a pair of shoes, though I had vowed a hundred times to give her nothing more, and I used the occasion for a lecture. She seemed eager to interrupt once or twice, and I flattered myself my words were having their effect. And now what had she to say? I asked when my eloquence was exhausted. She giggled: "Would _Madame_ look at her feet in _Madame's_ shoes? _Jamais je ne me suis vue si bien chaussee_," and she was going straight to the _Quartier_ "_pour eblouir le monde_," she said. When Augustine took her in hand, though Augustine's eloquence had a vigour mine could not boast of, the result was, if anything, more discouraging. Clementine, made bold by custom, would turn a hand-spring or dance a jig, or go through the other accomplishments she had picked up in the slums.