Of course, Zizi began to cry again; and, of course, she could do nothing less than accept Madame’s proposition with some show of effusion: though I mistrusted the whole-heartedness of her acceptance; she would much rather have pocketed the fifty francs, and had done with us.
Elinor and she fell to discussing sundry practical details. Good and abundant food, warm clothing, healthful lodgings: these were the three desiderata that Elinor prescribed. As for the last, Zizi assured us that she already had them—“since I live in the same house as Monsieur,” she explained, convincingly.
But Elinor was not convinced. “Do your rooms face south?” was the question she insisted on.
Now Zizi, about the points of the compass, and such abstruse matters generally, had no more idea than I have of Sanskrit; yet, “Oh, yes, my room gives to the noon,” she answered, without turning a hair. “And, anyhow, it is a very nice room.—Come and see,” she added, impulsively. “I should be charmed to show you.”
“I suppose it will be all right?” Elinor asked of me.
“Oh, no worse than the rest,” I acquiesced.
And so we took a cab, and were driven to the Rue St. Jacques. Madame Germaine parted from us at the threshold of the eating-house. “I have an engagement in the Parc Monceau,” she informed us, in the candour of her heart. Zizi jeered at her a good deal as we drove across the town. “Her ribbons—hein? Her goggle-eyes! Not at all comme il faut. But a brave girl. She loves me like a sister. Monsieur smiles. No, word of honour, it is not as you think.” If I had thought as Zizi thought I thought, I shouldn’t have smiled; but she, of course, couldn’t be expected to understand that. “Poor Germaine! Her real name is Gobbeau, Marthe Gobbeau. She is stupid and ugly, but she is good-natured,” which was more, perhaps, than one could say with truth of her little critic. “Her mother is an ouvreuse in the Théâtre de Belleville.”
“Her father!” cried Zizi, and she was about to continue, when it occurred to her to respect Elinor’s unsophistication. She gave me a furtive wink, and said, gravely, “Oh, her father lives in the twenty-first arrondissement.” Elinor was not aware that the arrondissements of Paris number only twenty, and so she could not realise either the double meaning or the antiquity of this evasion.