Too, she was admitted to the secret of the victimizing of these men both by their wives and their mistresses. She heard Madame Francine explain suavely how many of the wives, permitted unlimited charge accounts at as many shops as they chose, were given little cash by their husbands. Madame Francine answered Mimi’s guileless question why husbands with money to give did not give it to their wives with a knowing little laugh. “Wives with too much money to spend might—with interesting young men around—well, they might forget they’re wives.” Mimi listened with amazement as Madame Francine told her how the wives—and the mistresses—frequently came and bought gowns costing three hundred dollars for which a bill was sent to the man for four hundred.
“And what becomes of the extra hundred?” Mimi asked.
“We give that in cash to the customer, little innocent! … What will happen if we don’t? They’ll go to another shop and we’ll have lost a customer.”
Despite all she had undergone, Mimi realized that she knew pitifully little about the ways of the world. Duplicity, deceit, lying, dishonesty, all around her and she had never even suspected it. I am a silly little innocent, she mused. In a flash Whitman’s lines came back to her:
“Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish, Of myself for ever reproaching myself (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?) …”
She was faithless and foolish. If she weren’t she’d drop the whole thing and get herself a job scrubbing floors, washing dishes, anything rather than be a willing part of this sort of trickery. But even as she