She laid down the book, caught up a pen, and exclaimed:—
“And I know how to write, too!”
She dipped her pen in the ink, and turning to Marius:—
“Do you want to see? Look here, I’m going to write a word to show you.”
And before he had time to answer, she wrote on a sheet of white paper, which lay in the middle of the table: “The bobbies are here.”
Then throwing down the pen:—
“There are no faults of orthography. You can look. We have received an education, my sister and I. We have not always been as we are now. We were not made—”
Here she paused, fixed her dull eyes on Marius, and burst out laughing, saying, with an intonation which contained every form of anguish, stifled by every form of cynicism:—
“Bah!”
And she began to hum these words to a gay air:—
J’ai faim, mon père. Pas de fricot. J’ai froid, ma mère. Pas de tricot. Grelotte, Lolotte! Sanglote, Jacquot!
She had hardly finished this couplet, when she exclaimed:—
“Do you ever go to the play, Monsieur Marius? I do. I have a little brother who is a friend of the artists, and who gives me tickets sometimes. But I don’t like the benches in the galleries. One is cramped and uncomfortable there. There are rough people there sometimes; and people who smell bad.”