A Second Home | Page 2

and the dining-room. Over the chimney-piece were a piece
of looking-glass, a tinder-box, three glasses, some matches, and a large,
cracked white jug. Still, the floor, the utensils, the fireplace, all gave a
pleasant sense of the perfect cleanliness and thrift that pervaded the dull
and gloomy home.
The old woman's pale, withered face was quite in harmony with the
darkness of the street and the mustiness of the place. As she sat there,
motionless, in her chair, it might have been thought that she was as
inseparable from the house as a snail from its brown shell; her face,
alert with a vague expression of mischief, was framed in a flat cap
made of net, which barely covered her white hair; her fine, gray eyes
were as quiet as the street, and the many wrinkles in her face might be
compared to the cracks in the walls. Whether she had been born to
poverty, or had fallen from some past splendor, she now seemed to
have been long resigned to her melancholy existence.
From sunrise till dark, excepting when she was getting a meal ready, or,
with a basket on her arm, was out purchasing provisions, the old
woman sat in the adjoining room by the further window, opposite a
young girl. At any hour of the day the passer-by could see the
needlewoman seated in an old, red velvet chair, bending over an
embroidery frame, and stitching indefatigably.
Her mother had a green pillow on her knee, and busied herself with
hand-made net; but her fingers could move the bobbin but slowly; her
sight was feeble, for on her nose there rested a pair of those antiquated
spectacles which keep their place on the nostrils by the grip of a spring.
By night these two hardworking women set a lamp between them; and
the light, concentrated by two globe-shaped bottles of water, showed
the elder the fine network made by the threads on her pillow, and the
younger the most delicate details of the pattern she was embroidering.
The outward bend of the window had allowed the girl to rest a box of
earth on the window-sill, in which grew some sweet peas, nasturtiums,
a sickly little honeysuckle, and some convolvulus that twined its frail
stems up the iron bars. These etiolated plants produced a few pale

flowers, and added a touch of indescribable sadness and sweetness to
the picture offered by this window, in which the two figures were
appropriately framed.
The most selfish soul who chanced to see this domestic scene would
carry away with him a perfect image of the life led in Paris by the
working class of women, for the embroideress evidently lived by her
needle. Many, as they passed through the turnstile, found themselves
wondering how a girl could preserve her color, living in such a cellar.
A student of lively imagination, going that way to cross to the
Quartier-Latin, would compare this obscure and vegetative life to that
of the ivy that clung to these chill walls, to that of the peasants born to
labor, who are born, toil, and die unknown to the world they have
helped to feed. A house-owner, after studying the house with the eye of
a valuer, would have said, "What will become of those two women if
embroidery should go out of fashion?" Among the men who, having
some appointment at the Hotel de Ville or the Palais de Justice, were
obliged to go through this street at fixed hours, either on their way to
business or on their return home, there may have been some charitable
soul. Some widower or Adonis of forty, brought so often into the
secrets of these sad lives, may perhaps have reckoned on the poverty of
this mother and daughter, and have hoped to become the master at no
great cost of the innocent work-woman, whose nimble and dimpled
fingers, youthful figure, and white skin--a charm due, no doubt, to
living in this sunless street--had excited his admiration. Perhaps, again,
some honest clerk, with twelve hundred francs a year, seeing every day
the diligence the girl gave to her needle, and appreciating the purity of
her life, was only waiting for improved prospects to unite one humble
life with another, one form of toil to another, and to bring at any rate a
man's arm and a calm affection, pale-hued like the flowers in the
window, to uphold this home.
Vague hope certainly gave life to the mother's dim, gray eyes. Every
morning, after the most frugal breakfast, she took up her pillow, though
chiefly for the look of the thing, for she would lay her spectacles on a
little mahogany worktable as old as herself, and look out of the window
from about half-past eight till ten at the