apron with a bib like those worn by hospital nurses.

Her face was thin and her voice shrill. When she was twenty-five, she
looked forty. After she had passed fifty, nobody could tell her
age; erect and silent always, she resembled a wooden figure working
automatically.




CHAPTER II

Like every other woman, she had had an affair of the heart. Her father,
who was a mason, was killed by falling from a scaffolding. Then her
mother died and her sisters went their different ways; a farmer took her
in, and while she was quite small, let her keep cows in the fields. She
was clad in miserable rags, beaten for the slightest offence and finally
dismissed for a theft of thirty sous which she did not commit. She took
service on another farm where she tended the poultry; and as she was
well thought of by her master, her fellow-workers soon grew jealous.

One evening in August (she was then eighteen years old), they persuaded
her to accompany them to the fair at Colleville. She was immediately
dazzled by the noise, the lights in the trees, the brightness of the
dresses, the laces and gold crosses, and the crowd of people all
hopping at the same time. She was standing modestly at a distance, when
presently a young man of well-to-do appearance, who had been leaning on
the pole of a wagon and smoking his pipe, approached her, and asked her
for a dance. He treated her to cider and cake, bought her a silk shawl,
and then, thinking she had guessed his purpose, offered to see her home.