Brussels is always associated in one's mind with its laces. We visited one of the manufactories. A dozen or twenty women were busy in a sunny, cheerful room, working out the pretty leaves and flowers, with needle and thread, for the _point_ lace, or twisting the bobbins among the innumerable pins in the cushion before them to follow the pattern for the _point appliqué_. When completed, you know, the delicate designs are sewed upon gossamer lace. Upon a long, crimson-covered table in the room above were spread out, in tempting array, the results of this tiresome labor--coiffures that would almost resign one to a bald spot, handkerchiefs insnaring as cobwebs, _barbes_ that fairly pierced our hearts, and shawls for which there are no words. I confess that these soft, delicate things have for women a wonderful charm--that as we turned over and over in our hands the frail, yellow-white cobwebs, some of us more than half forgot the tenth commandment.
_Table-d'hôte_ over, one evening, "Where shall we go? What can we do?" queried one of the four girls in our party, two of whom had but just now escaped from the thraldom of a French _pensionnat_.
"It would be so delightful if we could walk out for once by ourselves. If there were only something to see--somewhere to go."
"Girls!" exclaimed Axelle, suddenly, "was not the scene of _Villette_ laid in Brussels? Is not Charlotte Brontë's boarding-school here? I am sure it is. Suppose we seek it out--we four girls alone."
"But how, and where?" and "Wouldn't that be fine?" chorused the others. There was a hasty search through guide-books; but alas! not a clew could we find, not a peg upon which to hang the suspicions that were almost certainties.
"I am sure it was here," persisted Axelle. "I wish we had a _Villette_."
"We could get one at an English library," suggested another.
"If there is any English library here," added a third, doubtfully.
Evidently that must be our first point of departure. We could ask for information there. Accordingly we planned our crusade, as girls do,--the elders smiling unbelief, as elders will,--and sallied out at last into the summer sunshine, very brave in our hopes, very glad in our unwonted liberty. A _commissionaire_ gave us the address of the bookstore we sought as we were leaving the hotel. "There are no obstacles in the path of the determined," we said, stepping out upon the Rue Royale. Across the way was the grand park, a maze of winding avenues, shaded by lofty trees, with nymphs, and fauns, and satyrs hiding among the shrubbery, and with all the tortuous paths made into mosaic pavement by the shimmering sunlight. But to Axelle _Villette_ was more real than that June day.