those creatures who can only read Cocker and only write in figures. She
was an intelligent and witty girl, and some drops of the blood of Mansu
in her veins and, rebellious to all yokes, she had never been able to
help yielding to a fancy, whatever might be the consequences.

Marcel was really the only man she had ever loved. He was at any rate
the only one for whose sake she had really suffered, and it had needed
all the stubbornness of the instincts that attracted her to all that
glittered and jingled to make her leave him. She was twenty, and for her
luxury was almost a matter of existence. She might do without it for a
time, but she could not give it up completely. Knowing her inconstancy,
she had never consented to padlock her heart with an oath of fidelity.
She had been ardently loved by many young fellows for whom she had
herself felt a strong fancy, and she had always acted towards them with
far-sighted probity; the engagements into which she entered were simple,
frank and rustic as the love-making of Moliere's peasants. "You want me
and I should like you too, shake hands on it and let us enjoy
ourselves." A dozen times if she had liked Musette could have secured a
good position, which is termed a future, but she did not believe in the
future and professed the scepticism of Figaro respecting it.

"Tomorrow," she sometimes remarked, "is an absurdity of the almanac, it
is a daily pretext that men have invented in order to put off their
business today. Tomorrow may be an earthquake. Today, at any rate, we
are on solid ground."

One day a gentleman with whom she had stayed nearly six months, and who
had become wildly in love with her, seriously proposed marriage.
Musette burst out laughing in his face at this offer.