"We are polite, all the same," she remarked approvingly. She sipped her grenadine. Having nothing further to say he sipped his beer. Presently she said: "I saw you this afternoon at the _boite_." He looked at her with a touch of interest. No one would allude to the music-hall as the "box" except a fellow professional engaged there. "You too?" he asked. She nodded. She belonged to a troupe of dancing girls. As they were the first number, they got away early. She and her friend had gone for a walk and found this restaurant. It was gay, wasn't it? He said, soberly: "You were dancing at rehearsal this morning. You've danced at the music-hall this afternoon, you'll be dancing again this evening--why do you dance here?" "One can only be young once," she replied. "How old are you?" "Seventeen. And you?" "Twenty-two." She would have given him thirty, she said, he looked so serious. And he, regarding her more narrowly, would have given her fifteen. She was very young, slight, scarcely formed, yet her movements were lithe and complete like those of a young lizard. She had laughing, black eyes and a fresh mouth set in a thin dark face that might one day grow haggard or coarse, according to her physical development, but was now full with the devil's beauty of youth. A common type, one that would not arrest masculine eyes as she passed by. Dozens of the girls there round about might have called her sister. She was dressed with cheap neatness, the soiled white wing of a bird in her black hat being the only touch of bravura. She spoke with the rich accent of the South. "You are of the _Midi?_" he said. Yes. She came from Marseilles. Ingenuously chattering she gave him her family history. In the meanwhile her companions and her partner having finished their dance had retired to a sequestered corner of the restaurant, leaving the pair here to themselves. Lackaday learned that her name was Elodie Figasso. Her father was dead. Her mother was a dressmaker, in which business she, too, had made her apprenticeship. But an elderly man, a _huissier_, one of those people who go about with a tricolour-rosetted cocked hat, and steel buttons and canvas trousers and a leather satchel chained to their waist, had lately diverted from Elodie the full tide of maternal affection. As she hated the _huissier_, a vulgar man who thought of nothing but the good things that the Veuve Figasso could put into his stomach, and as her besotted mother starved them both in order to fulfil the _huissier's_ demands, and as she derived no compensating joy from her dressmaking, she had found, thanks to a friend, a positron as _figurante_ in a Marseilles Revue, and, _voilà_--there she was free, independent, and, since she had talent and application, was now earning her six francs a day.