“These men! They think themselves of much importance,” she said as she resumed her pastry making.

Having tied a great linen apron around Judy’s slender waist (much slenderer in the last month from her economical living), and having instructed her in the prices of the cooked food displayed in the show cases, Mère Tricot turned over the shop to her care. The rosy baby was lying in a wooden cradle in the back of the little shop and the grandmother was in plain view in the tiny kitchen to be seen beyond the living room.

“Well, I fancy I am almost domesticated,” thought Judy. “What an interior this would make—baby in foreground and old Mother Tricot[89] on through with her rolling pin. Light fine! I’ve a great mind to paint while I am keeping shop, sketch, anyhow.”

[89]

She whipped out her sketch book and sketched in her motive with sure and clever strokes, but art is long and shops must be kept. Customers began to pile in. The spinach was very popular and Judy became quite an adept in dishing it out and weighing it. Potato salad was next in demand and cooked tongue and rosbif disappeared rapidly. Many soldiers lounged in, eating their sandwiches in the shop. Judy enjoyed her morning greatly but she could not remember ever in her life having worked harder.

When the tarts were finished and displayed temptingly in the window, swarms of children arrived. It seemed that Mère Tricot’s tarts were famous in the Quarter. More soldiers came, too. Among them was a face strangely familiar to the amateur shop girl. Who could it be? It was the face of a typical Boulevardier: dissipated, ogling eyes; black moustache and beard waxed[90] until they looked like sharp spikes; a face not homely but rather handsome, except for its expression of infinite conceit and impertinence.

[90]

“I have never seen him before, I fancy. It is just the type that is familiar to me,” she thought. “Mais quel type!”

Judy was looking very pretty, with her cheeks flushed from the excitement of weighing out spinach and salad, making change where sous were thought of as though they were gold and following the patois of the peasants that came to buy and the argot of the gamin. She had donned a white cap of Marie’s which was most becoming. Judy, always ready to act a part, with an instinctive dramatic spirit had entered into the rôle of shop keeper with a vim that bade fair to make the Tricots’ the most popular place on Boulevarde Montparnasse. Her 

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