"I should dearly like to know," Emile remarked to this pleasing being,
"if you ever reflect upon your future?"

"My future!" she answered with a laugh. "What do you mean by my
future? Why should I think about something that does not exist as yet?
I never look before or behind. Isn't one day at a time more than I can
concern myself with as it is? And besides, the future, as we know,
means the hospital."

"How can you forsee a future in the hospital, and make no effort to
avert it?"

"What is there so alarming about the hospital?" asked the terrific
Aquilina. "When we are neither wives nor mothers, when old age draws
black stockings over our limbs, sets wrinkles on our brows, withers up
the woman in us, and darkens the light in our lover's eyes, what could
we need when that comes to pass? You would look on us then as mere
human clay; we with our habiliments shall be for you like so much mud
--worthless, lifeless, crumbling to pieces, going about with the
rustle of dead leaves. Rags or the daintiest finery will be as one to
us then; the ambergris of the boudoir will breathe an odor of death
and dry bones; and suppose there is a heart there in that mud, not one
of you but would make mock of it, not so much as a memory will you
spare to us. Is not our existence precisely the same whether we live
in a fine mansion with lap-dogs to tend, or sort rags in a workhouse?
Does it make much difference whether we shall hide our gray heads
beneath lace or a handkerchief striped with blue and red; whether we
sweep a crossing with a birch broom, or the steps of the Tuileries
with satins; whether we sit beside a gilded hearth, or cower over the
ashes in a red earthen pot; whether we go to the Opera or look on in