or jacket. She continued to wear a cap with starched wings, and shoes
with high heels. Though she was now fifty-seven years old, and her
lifetime of vigorous household work ought now to be rewarded with
well-earned repose, she was incessantly employed in knitting her
husband's stockings and her own, and those of an uncle, just as her
countrywomen knit them, moving about the room, talking, pacing up and
down the garden, or looking round the kitchen to watch what was going
on.

The Saillard's avarice, which was really imposed on them in the first
instance by dire necessity, was now a second nature. When the cashier
got back from the office, he laid aside his coat, and went to work in
the large garden, shut off from the courtyard by an iron railing, and
which the family reserved to itself. For years Elisabeth, the
daughter, went to market every morning with her mother, and the two
did all the work of the house. The mother cooked well, especially a
duck with turnips; but, according to Saillard, no one could equal
Elisabeth in hashing the remains of a leg of mutton with onions. "You
might eat your boots with those onions and not know it," he remarked.
As soon as Elisabeth knew how to hold a needle, her mother had her
mend the household linen and her father's coats. Always at work, like
a servant, she never went out alone. Though living close by the
boulevard du Temple, where Franconi, La Gaite, and l'Ambigu-Comique
were within a stone's throw, and, further on, the Porte-Saint-Martin,
Elisabeth had never seen a comedy. When she asked to "see what it was
like" (with the Abbe Gaudron's permission, be it understood), Monsieur
Baudoyer took her--for the glory of the thing, and to show her the
finest that was to be seen--to the Opera, where they were playing "The
Chinese Laborer." Elisabeth thought "the comedy" as wearisome as the
plague of flies, and never wished to see another. On Sundays, after