idleness, and awkwardly conscious of her absent broom.

Mame brings her along, and looking back as I walk, I hear her talking
of me, hastily, as one who confides a choking secret, while Apolline
follows, with her arms swinging far from her body, limping and
outspread like a crab.

Says Mame, "That boy's bedroom is untidy. And then, too, he uses too
many shirt-collars, and he doesn't know how to blow his nose. He
stuffs handkerchiefs into his pockets, and you find them again like
stones."

"All the same, he's a good young man," stammers the waddling street
cleanser, brandishing her broom-bereaved hands at random, and shaking
over her swollen and many-storied boots a skirt weighted round the hem
by a coat-of-mail of dry mud.

These confidences with which Mame is in the habit of breaking forth
before no matter whom get on my nerves. I call her with some
impatience. She starts at the command, comes up, and throws me a
martyr's glance.

She proceeds with her nose lowered under her black hat with green
foliage, hurt that I should thus have summoned her before everybody,
and profoundly irritated. So a persevering malice awakens again in the
depths of her, and she mutters, very low, "You spat on the window the
other day!"

But she cannot resist hooking herself again on to another interlocutor,
whose Sunday trousers are planted on the causeway, like two posts, and