“So this is how we repay kindnesses!” Madame Delagrange began, slowly wetting her lips with her tongue. According to Henriette she was exactly like an ogress in a picture book savouring in anticipation the pretty morsel she meant to devour for supper. “We make troubles and inconveniences for the kind old fool of a woman who lets us sing our little songs in her Bar and dance with her clients and who pays us generously into the bargain. We won’t help her at all to keep the roof over her head. We treat her rich clients like mud. Only the beautiful officers are good enough for us! Bah! And we are virtuous too! Oh, he, he, he! Yes, but virtue isn’t bread and butter, my little one. So here’s an address.” She took a slip of paper from the shelf behind her and pushed it towards Marguerite. Marguerite took a step forward to the counter and picked up the paper.
“What am I to do with this, Madame?” she asked in perplexity.
“You are to go to that address, Mademoiselle.”
Marguerite shrank back, her face white as paper, her great eyes wide with horror.
Madame Delagrange nodded her head at Marguerite with an indignant satisfaction.
“Off you go! We shall be a little more modest, to-morrow evening, eh? We shan’t look at everybody as if they would dirty our little slippers if we stepped on them. Come, take your seven francs and hurry off. Or,” and she thrust out her lips savagely, “never come back to the Villa Iris.”
Marguerite stood and stared at the paper in her hands.
“Make your choice, little one. I want to go to bed.”
Marguerite folded the paper and with the tears running down her cheeks slowly tore it across and across and let the fragments flutter down to the floor. Madame Delagrange uttered an oath and then let loose upon the girl such a flood of vile abuse, that even those hiding behind the door of the dressing room had never heard the like of it.
“Out with you,” she said, spitting upon the ground and sweeping the seven francs off the counter towards Marguerite, so that they rolled and spun and rattled upon the floor. “Pick up your money and get your rags together and march! Quick now!”
She lolled over the counter screaming with laughter as Marguerite ran hither and thither seeking through her blinding tears for the coins, stooping and picking them up. “There’s another somewhere,” the old harridan cried, holding her fat sides. “Seek! Seek! Good dog! It takes ten years off my life to see the haughty Miss Touch-me-not running about after her pennies.”