worth so much? _That is the question_, as Shakespeare says."

"Now, good-bye, ducky!" said Valerie, who had only eaten a few
mouthfuls of the veal, from which the maid had extracted all the gravy
for a brave soldier just home from Algiers. "Great evils demand heroic
remedies."

"Valerie, where are you off to?" cried Marneffe, standing between his
wife and the door.

"I am going to see the landlord," she replied, arranging her ringlets
under her smart bonnet. "You had better try to make friends with that
old maid, if she really is your chief's cousin."



The ignorance in which the dwellers under one roof can exist as to the
social position of their fellow-lodgers is a permanent fact which, as
much as any other, shows what the rush of Paris life is. Still, it is
easily conceivable that a clerk who goes early every morning to his
office, comes home only to dinner, and spends every evening out, and a
woman swallowed up in a round of pleasures, should know nothing of an
old maid living on the third floor beyond the courtyard of the house
they dwell in, especially when she lives as Mademoiselle Fischer did.

Up in the morning before any one else, Lisbeth went out to buy her
bread, milk, and live charcoal, never speaking to any one, and she
went to bed with the sun; she never had a letter or a visitor, nor
chatted with her neighbors. Here was one of those anonymous,
entomological existences such as are to be met with in many large