Did they really and honestly find the absorbing joy in their children, which was the sentimental tradition? And if they did, how did they manage it? She loved Marise, nobody had a nicer little girl, nor a prettier. But the plain facts were that a little girl and a grown woman were very different beings, with very different needs and interests. There was nothing she would not do for Marise, she often told herself, if Marise needed it. But Marise apparently did not need a single thing her mother could do for her, any more than any healthy little girl absorbed in her school and play. There was no sense in doing uninteresting things for people when they were just as well off without them. She often looked at Marise across the dinner-table, fresh and well-groomed by Jeanne's competent hands, and wondered with a sincere bewilderment how any one could expect her to make an occupation out of loving a very busy, self-centered, much-occupied little girl, who left the house before her mother was out of bed, was gone all day, spent most of her few free hours with her music teacher, and in the nature of things went to bed just at the beginning of the evening. From time to time, when they had first come to Bayonne, she had made various attempts to connect her life with Marise's, annoyed by the affection Marise showed to Jeanne and to that singularly unattractive Mlle. Hasparren. Breaking through the tyrannical regularity of the child's hard-working life, she had carried her off, now for a day on the beach at Guethary, now for a day in the shops at Biarritz, once for a week-end at Saint Sauveur. But she had come home after such attempts, mortally weary and depressed. What was the use of trying to pretend that the things which delighted and amused a child were not inconceivably tiresome to a grown-up? Those endless hours while she sat in the sun on the sand (which got into her Shoes), and watched Marise inanely prance in the surf, or dig for clams which she did not care to keep after she had caught them! How could she see anything but very visible repulsiveness and dirt, and quite probably diseases in the lank stray dogs and cats which always turned up when Marise went along a street, and which Marise always felt an inexplicable and perverse desire to fondle? And those cheap bazaars, where Marise loved to linger, gazing with dazzled eyes at the trumpery, papier-mache gimcracks and playthings...! Of course, as Marise had grown less childish, walks had been free of hoop-rolling with its inevitable encounters with irascible old gentlemen's legs, but she had developed other tastes quite as bothersome. Flora's pretty, slender feet ached with fatigue at the recollection of the long hours she had stood beside Marise, who, sucking hard on a barley-sugar stick, and hooking her elbows over the parapet of the bridge over the Adour, gazed endlessly down on dirty, smelly ships being unloaded by dirty, smelly workmen.