It seldom occurred to her she could have asked and received aid from the Hunters, Mrs. Daquin or her Aunt Sophie. The idea at times of greatest need came fleetingly to her, hazily, but she resolutely put it from her mind before it could find lodgment there. Whatever else might come to her, she would never yield to such temptations, at least she would never permit herself to beg from her stepmother or Carl’s parents. To do so would have been surrender of the principle for which she had so bravely fought—the determination to keep her own soul free. However adroitly worded, a plea to them would have been admission of defeat, of her failure to make good the lofty words of determination she had spoken. She knew they did not understand the motives which had driven her on. In truth, she sometimes wondered if she herself knew them. But when she held Jean in her arms, when his toothless smile greeted her on her calling for him at the nursery, when his warm flesh rested against her side in bed, she was happy to a degree which she knew would never have been possible had she accepted the easier way out of her difficulties. No, despite all, she knew, her course had been the only one she could have taken in the face of Carl’s abject failure to measure up to the high qualities with which she had in fancy endowed him.
One extravagance, a pitifully small one, she permitted herself. In the late spring she passed an old secondhand book shop on a side street. She lingered at the weather-beaten old table outside the shop, fingering, examining, peeping into the battered and worn books displayed there. Volume after volume she looked into but most of them were dull and prosy stuff which bored her. She lingered so long the proprietor came to the door and stood there looking everywhere except at her, with too great casualness, Mimi reflected with a smile. It amused her to watch him with equal lack of obviousness, knowing that his suspiciousness led him to remain there. She named him “Old Scrooge,” for he looked as though he had stepped from Dickens’ pages with his fringe of dusty grey hair, his square, steel-rimmed spectacles, his baggy and nondescript clothing.