But no, Virginie even smiled slightly.

Then, as her basket was blocking the staircase, the laundress wished to show how polite she, too, could be.
"I beg your pardon," she said.
"You are completely excused," replied the tall brunette.
And they remained conversing together on the stairs, reconciled at once without having ventured on a single allusion to the past.

Virginie, then twenty-nine years old, had become a superb woman of strapping proportions, her face, however, looking rather long between her two plaits of jet black hair.

She at once began to relate her history just to show off.

She had a husband now; she had married in the spring an ex-journeyman cabinetmaker, who recently left the army, and who had applied to be admitted into the police, because a post of that kind is more to be depended upon and more respectable.