“Make your choice, little one. I want to go to bed.”

Marguerite folded the paper and with the tears running down her cheeks slowly tore it across and across and let the fragments flutter down to the floor. Madame Delagrange uttered an oath and then let loose upon the girl such a flood of vile abuse, that even those hiding behind the door of the dressing room had never heard the like of it.

“Out with you,” she said, spitting upon the ground and sweeping the seven francs off the counter towards Marguerite, so that they rolled and spun and rattled upon the floor. “Pick up your money and get your rags together and march! Quick now!”

She lolled over the counter screaming with laughter as Marguerite ran hither and thither seeking through her blinding tears for the coins, stooping and picking them up. “There’s another somewhere,” the old harridan cried, holding her fat sides. “Seek! Seek! Good dog! It takes ten years off my life to see the haughty Miss Touch-me-not running about after her pennies.”

Marguerite had got to retrieve them all. In the dreadful penury in which she lived, a single franc had the importance of gold. So she ran about the room, searched under tables and chairs and in the corners. The seven francs were all her capital. They stood between her and death by hunger. She must go on her knees and peer through the veil of her tears for the last of them. Even the women behind the door, hardened though they were, felt the humiliation of that scene in the marrow of their bones, felt it as something horrible and poignant and disturbing. As soon as Marguerite had picked up her money, Madame Delagrange shuffled out from behind her counter.

“Now come along with me. I mean to see that you don’t take away what doesn’t belong to you.”

She took the weeping girl by the elbow and pushed her along in front of her to the dressing room. Then she stood over her whilst she changed into her street dress and put up her dancing kit in a bundle.

“Do you miss anything, girls?” Madame Delagrange asked with her heavy-handed irony and indeed with an evident hope that one of them would miss something and the police could be sent for. But all of them were quick to say no, though not one of them had the courage to take Marguerite by the hand and wish her good luck in the face of the old blowsy termagant.

“Very well then!” and Madame Delagrange took a step towards Marguerite who shrank back 

 Prev. P 73/191 next