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Updated: July 20, 2025
How we have all talked about you and Miss Alice lately. It was such an extraordinary settlement!" Jane forced herself into the show-room, listened mechanically to the exclamations and remarks of Mademoiselle, the forewoman, shook hands with all the work-girls she had known, looked with vacant eyes on the new sleeve, and heard its merits descanted on very fully; then went back into Mrs.
In an avenue of shops she paused before a milliner's window, and said to herself: "Why shouldn't I earn my living by trimming hats?" She met work-girls streaming out under a doorway, and scattering to catch trams and omnibuses; and she looked with newly-wakened interest at their tired independent faces. "Why shouldn't I earn my living as well as they do?" she thought.
Arsinoe's washed dress had caught the old man's eye, and remembering that Gabinius the curiosity-dealer had that very morning been to him to enquire whether Arsinoe were not in fact one of his work-girls, and to repeat his statement that her father was a beggarly toady, full of haughty airs, whose curiosities, of which he contemptuously mentioned a few, were worth nothing, Plutarch was hastily asking himself how he could best defend his pretty protege against the envious tongues of her rivals; for many spiteful speeches of theirs had already come to his ears.
She was only one of his work-girls, and her short experience had shown her that but few of her associates received better treatment from him. "Thank you," was all she said as, with downcast eyes, she picked her way through the crowded workroom, down the long, steep staircase reserved for employees and so on to the street.
He had meant to treat her as he had used to do those work-girls a little wine, a little wooing, a little folly and passion, idle as a butterfly and brief as a rainbow one midsummer day and night then a handful of gold, a caress, a good-morrow, and forgetfulness ever afterwards that was what he had meant when he had brought her out to the forest of Soignies. But she was different, this child.
To study the shop was to find many suggestions of the types of people living in the surrounding buildings alphabets and whistles for children; playing-cards for gamesters; camphor cigarettes for invalids; sewing-cases for work-girls; mirrors for coquettes; and toys innumerable, "all one sou." In the grand shops on the fashionable boulevards you may see the last new mode in toys for no season goes by in Paris without bringing some especial toy or toys to become "the rage" but in the Rue Mouffetard the toys are all classics. They have been handed down from generation to generation precisely in the forms you see them here. Babies who are now tottering grandfathers and grandmothers played with the toys of the "boutique
Women were there in great numbers: young work-girls, all rosy, with white linen, and clean petticoats, who tripped along briskly from one end of the glazed partition to the other, opening great attentive eyes, as if they were before the dressed shop window of a linendraper.
But those little work-girls had been mere homely daisies, and daisies already with the dust of the pavement and of the dancing-gardens upon them. Bébée was as pure and fresh as these dew-wet dog-roses that she found in the thickets of thorn.
And now, too, came a stream of work-girls, some of them in bright skirts, some glancing at the passers-by; girls whose wages were so paltry, so insufficient, that now and again pretty ones among them never more turned their faces homewards, whilst the ugly ones wasted away, condemned to mere bread and water.
To appear natural he pushed his cap back on his head and planted his elbows on the table. The mechanic and the two work-girls examined him point by point before resuming their conversation in a subdued voice. The girl brought him a plate of grocer's hot peas, seasoned with pepper and vinegar, a fork and his ginger beer.
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