where the faces of father, aunt, and apprentice seemed strange and
unfamiliar, so completely had they disappeared from his thoughts.
Monsieur Servien was displeased with his son, but was too timid
as well as too tactful to make any overt reproaches. His aunt
overwhelmed him with garrulous expressions of doting affection;
at night she would creep into his room to see if he was sound
asleep, while all day long she wearied him with the tale of her
petty grievances and dislikes.

Once she had caught the apprentice with her spectacles, her sacred
spectacles, perched on his nose, and the profanation had left
a kind of religious horror in her mind.

"That boy is capable of anything," she used to say. One of the
boy's pet diversions was to execute behind the old lady's back a
war-dance of the Cannibal Islanders he had seen once at a theatre.
Sticking feathers he had plucked from a feather-broom in his hair,
and holding a big knife without a handle between his teeth, he
would creep nearer and nearer, crouching low and advancing by
little leaps and bounds, with ferocious grimaces which gradually
gave place to a look of disappointed appetite, as a closer scrutiny
showed how tough and leathery his victim was. Jean could not
help laughing at this buffoonery, trivial and ill-bred as it
was. His aunt had never got clearly to the bottom of the little
farce that dogged her heels, but more than once, turning her head
sharply, she had found reason to suspect something disrespectful
was going on. Nevertheless, she put up with the lad because of
his lowly origin. The only folks she really hated were the rich.
She was furious because the butcher's wife had gone to a wedding
in a silk dress.