For he never went home to her, nor with her, and most of the time that he spent with Bebee was in the quiet evening shadows, as she went up with her empty basket through the deserted country roads.
Bebee was all day long in the city, indeed, as other girls were, but with her it had always been different.

Antoine had always been with her up to the day of his death; and after his death she had sat in the same place, surrounded by the people she had known from infancy, and an insult to her would have been answered by a stroke from the cobbler's strap or from the tinker's hammer.

There was one girl only who ever tried to do her any harm--a good-looking stout wench, who stood at the corner of the Montagne de la Cour with a stall of fruit in the summer time, and in winter time drove a milk cart over the snow.

This girl would get at her sometimes, and talk of the students, and tell her how good it was to get out of the town on a holiday, and go to any one of the villages where there was Kermesse and dance, and drink the little blue wine, and have trinkets bought for one, and come home in the moonlight in a char-a-banc, with the horns sounding, and the lads singing, and the ribbons flying from the old horse's ears.
"She is such a little close sly thing!" thought the fruit girl, sulkily.
To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.
"We dance almost every evening, the children and I," Bebee had answered when urged fifty times by this girl to go to fairs, and balls at the wine shops.

"That does just as well.