That question of a wealthy marriage, of beautiful clothes, lasted all day long; nor did it interfere with their work-far from it.
These small Parisian industries, which have to do with the most trivial details of the toilet, keep the work-girls informed as to the fashions and fill their minds with thoughts of luxury and elegance.

To the poor girls who worked on Mademoiselle Le Mire's fourth floor, the blackened walls, the narrow street did not exist.

They were always thinking of something else and passed their lives asking one another: "Malvina, if you were rich what would you do?
For my part, I'd live on the Champs-Elysees." And the great trees in the square, the carriages that wheeled about there, coquettishly slackening their pace, appeared momentarily before their minds, a delicious, refreshing vision.
Little Chebe, in her corner, listened without speaking, industriously stringing her black grapes with the precocious dexterity and taste she had acquired in Desiree's neighborhood.

So that in the evening, when M.
Chebe came to fetch his daughter, they praised her in the highest terms.
Thereafter all her days were alike.

The next day, instead of black pearls, she strung white pearls and bits of false coral; for at Mademoiselle Le Mire's they worked only in what was false, in tinsel, and that was where little Chebe was to serve her apprenticeship to life.
For some time the new apprentice-being younger and better bred than the others--found that they held aloof from her.