The first complete memory of her father that Sylvia possessed was of following her mother out into the street on a clear moonlight night after rain and of seeing him seated in a puddle outside the house, singing an unintelligible song which he conducted with his umbrella. She remembered her mother's calling to him sharply, and how at last after numerous shakings and many reproaches he had walked into the house on all fours, carrying the umbrella in his mouth like a dog. She remembered that the umbrella was somehow wrong at the end, different from any other umbrella she had ever seen, so that when it was put into the hall-stand it looked like a fat old market woman instead of the trim young lady it should have resembled. She remembered how she had called her mother's attention to the loss of its feet and how her mother, having apparently realized for the first time her presence at the scene, had promptly hustled her up-stairs to bed with so much roughness that she had cried. When Sylvia was older and had become in a way her mother's confidante, sitting opposite to her in the window to sew until it was no longer possible to save oil for the lamp, she ventured to recall this scene. Her mother had laughed at the remembrance of it and had begun to hum the song her father had sung: La donna è mobile La da-di la-di-da. "Shall I ever forget him?" Madame Snow had cried. "It was the day your sister Elène was married, and he had been down to the railway-station to see them off to Bruxelles." Sylvia had asked what the words of the song meant, and had been told that they meant women were always running around. "Where?" she had pressed. "Some of them after men and others running away from them," her mother had replied. "Shall I do that when I'm big?" Sylvia had continued. "Which shall I do?" But it had been time to fetch the lamp and the question had remained unanswered. Sylvia was five when her sister Elène was married; soon afterward Henriette married, too. She remembered that very well, because Marie went to join Françoise in the other bedroom, and with only Marguerite and Valentine left, they no longer slept three in a bed. This association had often been very uncomfortable because Marguerite would eat biscuits, the crumbs of which used to scratch her legs; and worse than the crumbs was the invariable quarrel between Marguerite and Valentine that always ended in their pinching each other across Sylvia, so that she often got pinched by mistake.