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This was quite an affair, however, and the poor woman only made the venture because Celine had been fasting since the previous day. Eugene Toussaint, the mechanician, a man of fifty, was her stepbrother, by the first marriage contracted by her father. A young dressmaker whom the latter had subsequently wedded, had borne him three daughters, Pauline, Leonie and Hortense.
I must get ready for mass at once if I am to have time to go in and kiss aunt Leonie first," and I would know exactly what was the colour of the sunlight upon the Square, I could feel the heat and dust of the market, the shade behind the blinds of the shop into which Mamma would perhaps go on her way to mass, penetrating its odour of unbleached calico, to purchase a handkerchief or something, of which the draper himself would let her see what he had, bowing from the waist: who, having made everything ready for shutting up, had just gone into the back shop to put on his Sunday coat and to wash his hands, which it was his habit, every few minutes and even on the saddest occasions, to rub one against the other with an air of enterprise, cunning, and success.
Then Leonie whispered suddenly: "Quiet. The boss!" It was indeed Madame Titreville who entered. The tall thin woman usually stayed down in the shop. The girls were quite in awe of her because she never joked with them. All the heads were now bent over the work in diligent silence. Madame Titreville slowly circled the work-table.
But I can only promise to write you, soon. Believe me, you shall not wait longer than I can help. This is fair, I think. "And now, I can give you no more time to-day. No, you can do nothing, thank you. Léonie for me, old Kasha for the children they do everything. We leave the Petersburg station at five. Come then, if you will, to say good-bye to the little girls. Our au revoir must be here."
The list was headed, as usual, by the name of Sylvie, that plain, quiet little girl I have described before as being at once the best and ugliest pupil in the establishment; the second place had fallen to the lot of a certain Leonie Ledru, a diminutive, sharp-featured, and parchment-skinned creature of quick wits, frail conscience, and indurated feelings; a lawyer-like thing, of whom I used to say that, had she been a boy, she would have made a model of an unprincipled, clever attorney.
Gambetta was sincere. He said to her: "If the time should ever come when I shall lose my political station, when I am beaten in the struggle, when I am deserted and alone, will you not then marry me when I ask you?" And Leonie, with her arms about his neck, promised that she would.
But in summer, when we came back to the house, the sun would not have set; and while we were upstairs paying our visit to aunt Leonie its rays, sinking until they touched and lay along her window-sill, would there be caught and held by the large inner curtains and the bands which tied them back to the wall, and split and scattered and filtered; and then, at last, would fall upon and inlay with tiny flakes of gold the lemonwood of her chest-of-drawers, illuminating the room in their passage with the same delicate, slanting, shadowed beams that fall among the boles of forest trees.
B. was sent, by means of passes, into a state of lethargy, from which she emerged as Léonie II., so Léonie II., in her turn, was reduced by renewed passes to a state of lethargy from which she emerged no longer as Léonie II. but as Léonie III. This second waking is slow and gradual, but the personality which emerges is, in one important point, superior to either Léonie I. or Léonie II. Although one among the subject's phases, this phase possesses the memory of every phase.
Then she spread the white sand once more under the table and in a wide border around the edge of the room, and hung the brush outside the kitchen door. Father Van Hove smoked in silence as she moved about the room. At last he said to her, "Leonie, did you hear what our neighbor Maes said to-night as we were talking in the road?" "No," said his wife, "I was hurrying home to get supper."
Her hair was also loose; it was admirably fair. General D'Hubert recognized it with staggering emotion. Mademoiselle de Valmassigue! Adele! In distress! He became greatly alarmed, and got rid of his sister's hug definitely. Madame Leonie then extended her shapely bare arm out of her peignoir, pointing dramatically at the divan.