'It's a funny piece of business all the same! But it seems to please Monsieur Lazare. Though, indeed, he does not appear to be quite so full of it just now as he was. But he is so proud and obstinate that he will go on persisting in a thing, even if he is really sick to death of it. And if he just leaves those drunken fellows for a minute, they drive the nails in all crooked.' After she had swept the floor under the bed she added: 'And as for the duchess--' Pauline, who was scarcely listening to the woman, caught this word with surprise. 'The duchess? Whom are you talking of?' 'Mademoiselle Louise, of course! Wouldn't anyone say that she had sprung straight from Jupiter's thigh? If you were to go and look in her room and see all her little pots and pomades and scents----Why, as soon as ever you open the door, it all catches you at the throat, the place smells so! But she can't match you in good looks, for all that!' 'Oh, nonsense! I'm a mere country girl,' Pauline said with a smile; 'Louise is very graceful and refined.' 'Well, she may be all that; but she hasn't got a pretty face, all the same. I have had a good look at her when she has been washing herself; and I know that, if I were a man, I shouldn't be long in making up my mind between you.' Carried off by her feeling of enthusiastic conviction, she came and leaned against the window, close to Pauline. 'Just glance at her there on the beach! Doesn't she look a mere shrimp? She is certainly a long way off, and one can't expect her to appear as big as a church, but she ought to show a figure of some sort! Ah! there's Monsieur Lazare lifting her up, so that she mayn't wet her pretty little shoes. She can't weigh very much in his arms, that's certain! But there are some men who seem to prefer bones!' Véronique checked herself suddenly, as she felt Pauline quivering by her side. She was ever harping on this subject, as if she itched to talk of it. All that she heard and all that she saw--the conversations in the evening when Pauline was calumniated, the furtive smiles of Lazare and Louise, and the utter ingratitude of the whole family, which was rapidly growing into treason--stuck in her throat and made her choke. If she had gone up to the sick girl's room at the times when her honest heart glowed with a sense of some fresh injustice, she could not have restrained herself from revealing everything to Pauline, but her fear of making her ill kept her stamping about her kitchen, knocking her pots and pans about, and swearing that she could not go on much longer in that way, but would soon be driven into telling them all very roundly what she thought about them. However, when she got upstairs into Pauline's room, and a word that might vex or disturb the girl escaped her lips, she tried to recall it or explain it away with a touching awkwardness.