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For a week of nights and days I fell asleep I dreamt, and I woke upon these two questions. In the whole world there was no answer to them, except where one dark little man stood, sat, walked, lectured, under the head-piece of a bandit bonnet-grec, and within the girth of a sorry paletot, much be-inked, and no little adust. After that visit to the Rue des Mages, I did want to see him again.
This person occupied my chair; his olive hand held my desk open, his nose was lost to view amongst my papers. His back was towards me, but there could not be a moment's question about identity. Already was the attire of ceremony discarded: the cherished and ink-stained paletot was resumed; the perverse bonnet-grec lay on the floor, as if just dropped from the hand, culpably busy.
The morning light playing amongst our plants and laughing on our walls, caught an added lustre from M. Paul's all-benignant salute. The defiant and pagan bonnet-grec had vanished: bare-headed, he came upon us, carrying a Christian hat in his gloved hand.
I ventured to stretch my hand to the bonnet-grec which lay in grim repose on the window-sill. He followed this daring movement with his eye, no doubt in mixed pity and amazement at its presumption. "Ah!" he muttered, "if it came to that if Miss Lucy meddled with his bonnet-grec she might just put it on herself, turn garcon for the occasion, and benevolently go to the Athenee in his stead."
So, at last, crowning himself with his bonnet-grec, and taking his ruined "lunettes" from my hand with a clasp of kind pardon and encouragement, he made his bow, and went off to the Athenee in first-rate humour and spirits. After all this amiability, the reader will be sorry for my sake to hear that I was quarrelling with M. Paul again before night; yet so it was, and I could not help it.
Nobody flaunted in faded silk; nobody wore a second-hand best article. At six the bell rang merrily, and we poured down the staircase, through the carre, along the corridor, into the vestibule. There stood our Professor, wearing, not his savage-looking paletot and severe bonnet-grec, but a young-looking belted blouse and cheerful straw hat.
He put Sylvie down, making her lie quiet beside his bonnet-grec, and, depriving me of the pens and penknife, proceeded to slice, nib, and point with the accuracy and celerity of a machine. "Did I like the little book?" he now inquired. Suppressing a yawn, I said I hardly knew. "Had it moved me?" "I thought it had made me a little sleepy." It was of no use taking that tone with him.
Observe her when she has some knitting, or some other woman's work in hand, and sits the image of peace, calmly intent on her needles and her silk, some discussion meantime going on around her, in the course of which peculiarities of character are being developed, or important interests canvassed; she takes no part in it; her humble, feminine mind is wholly with her knitting; none of her features move; she neither presumes to smile approval, nor frown disapprobation; her little hands assiduously ply their unpretending task; if she can only get this purse finished, or this bonnet-grec completed, it is enough for her.
A delicate, silky, loving, and lovable little doggie she was, trotting at his side, looking with expressive, attached eyes into his face; and whenever he dropped his bonnet-grec or his handkerchief, which he occasionally did in play, crouching beside it with the air of a miniature lion guarding a kingdom's flag.
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