Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/226

and coffee, if she needed either, and never, from week's end to week's end, tasted of dessert or sweets, or knew what it was to dine off fowl, when by rare chance fowl was served at table. I was this lady's "paying guest" for four or five months; and if my lot was a hard one, I could console myself with the reflection that the servant's was infinitely harder. True, the servant did not, as I did, pay an exorbitant price for those discomforts, but we could both say that we had to deal with a singularly pleasant, affable, well-spoken, and agreeable woman, surprisingly intelligent, who kept her house in admirable order. She was secretary for several Catholic philanthropic works, and taught catechism, for a consideration, to poor children in some disreputable quarter of Paris. I thought of her, as I have thought of many another Christian philanthropist, Catholic and Protestant, how much more in keeping with the doctrine of Christ it would be to stay unpretentiously at home and practise the modest virtue of honesty, doing unto others as one would be done unto. On her way to her catechism class she would drop in to the woodman's to order wood for me, as a favour for which it was my duty to thank her, pay the woodman three francs, and virtuously charge me five in the bill. I was ill, and in the same spirit of benevolence she ordered everything needful for me—for a consideration.