Hôtel de Ville, in the midst of the buyings and sellings, the games and
the quarrels, the auctions and the Cheap Johns, the mountebank and the
marriage parties, that daily and hourly throng the Grande Place.

Here Bébée, from three years old, had been used to sit beside him. By
nature she was as gay as a lark. The people always heard her singing as
they passed the garden. The children never found their games so merry as
when she danced their rounds with them; and though she dreamed so much
out there in the air among the carnations and the roses, or in the long,
low workroom in the town, high against the crocketed pinnacles of the
cathedral, yet her dreams, if vaguely wistful, were all bright of hue and
sunny in their fantasies. Still, Bébée had one sad unsatisfied desire:
she wanted to know so much, and she knew nothing.

She did not care for the grand gay people.

When the band played, and the park filled, and the bright little cafés
were thronged with pleasure seekers, and the crowds flocked hither and
thither to the woods, to the theatres, to the galleries, to the
guinguettes, Bébée, going gravely along with her emptied baskets
homeward, envied none of these.

When at Noël the little children hugged their loads of puppets and
sugar-plums; when at the Fête Dieu the whole people flocked out
be-ribboned and vari-colored like any bed of spring anemones; when in the
merry midsummer the chars-a-bancs trundled away into the forest with
laughing loads of students and maidens; when in the rough winters the
carriages left furred and jewelled women at the doors of the operas or
the palaces,--Bébée, going and coming through the city to her flower
stall or lace work, looked at them all, and never thought of envy or