QUITE ALONE.

BOOK. THE FIRST: CHILDHOOD.
CHAPTER XXVII. AN ABBÉ.

LILY went into the cabinet of Mademoiselle
Marcassin a young lady pupil at a boarding–
school. The social status was not a very
dignified one; but, at all events, it was something.
The profound gentlemen who compile the census–
tables would have thought Lily worthy to be
registered as a single item in the educational
schedule. She entered the cabinet a schoolgirl.
She came out of it a hybrid creature,
something between a servant–of–all–work and a
galley–slave.

Mademoiselle Marcassin kept her word to her,
after a fashion. Lily was fed, lodged, and
clothed, after a fashion. That is to say, she was
privileged, after the pupils had fed, to consume
the scraps of their repast—her refectory not
being the common dining–room, but a side–place,
half pantry, half store–room, where not only the
copy–books, slates, drawing materials, and
suchlike, required by the young ladies, were kept in
stock; but likewise sacks of lentils and haricot–
beans, and large jars full of the peculiarly nasty
stewed pears which were unchangeably served at
the conclusion of the principal meal under the
generic title of "dessert."

She was lodged—but not in any of the
dormitories. She had a room to herself (a hole rather)
in the roof, where she had a mattress on the floor,
and an ewer and basin on a rush–bottomed chair.
The Marcassin was too rigorously just, to suffer
her to share in the sleeping accommodation
provided for pupils who paid; the Marcassin
was too kind, after a fashion, to degrade her by
forcing her to associate with the other servants.
She was clothed, too, was Lily, after a fashion.
Cast–off garments, mostly of the rag–and–tatter
description, were flung to her from time to time,
to be mended and cobbled together, when her
own rags gave signs of dropping off piecemeal.

She was permitted to pursue her studies, after
a fashion. When there was no particular slavery
in hand, she was suffered to sit in the class and
listen to the lessons. Neither bad marks nor
good marks were given her. She was beyond
these. If she, alone of a class, could answer a
question, she was not privileged to take her
competitors up. She remained, for good or evil, at
the bottom.

She helped about the house. She cleaned
knives sometimes. She combed the younger
children's hair. Sometimes she made beds.
She never scrubbed—for the scrubbing–brush
was an institution unknown to the Pension
Marcassin. In French housekeeping there is a
tradition that dry polishing is a holy thing, but
that hot water does harm. Lily's special task-
work, however, was in the lingerie, or wardrobe
of the school. She passed many hours there
every evening. There was always an immensity
of mending to do, and most of it fell to her lot.
As she was not allowed to touch the piano, for
fear of wearing out the keys; or to draw, because
crayons cost money, or to write, because paper
and slate pencil are expensive; her fingers might
have grown stiff and awkward but for the
compulsory lissomness they acquired in that
everlasting needlework. She grew to possess
astonishing dexterity as a sempstress.

Once a year, all the mattresses in the establishment
were ripped up, the wool taken out, and,
compressed into cakes as it generally was by
continuous pressure, carded, by means of iron
teeth set in wooden slabs, into fresh stuff. Two
prodigious old women, hoarse voiced and hairy
chinned, who looked as though they had been
horse–grenadiers in the Imperial Guard who had
taken to petticoats in their old age, used to come
to card those mattresses. They were paid two
francs a day, and their keep. Lily was permitted
to help them. The dust and flocculent particles
of the wool half choked her, but she carded as
well as she could. One of the old women used
to bring a stone flask full of corn brandy with
her, from which she frequently gurgled into her
old mouth what she called "la goutte du bon
Dieu." The other would persist in smoking a
short pipe in the intervals of labour, much to
the disgust of the Marcassin; but the old woman
worked cheaply and expeditiously, and so was
not denied her narcotic. Lily was dreadfully
afraid of both of them. They spat and swore,
and were like men.

"I remember," would one of these woolly
Chevaliers d'Eon say—"I remember, La Mère
Boustifaille, when the little King of Rome
used to be wheeled about the Tuileries Gardens