and have the time and money to make toys of their animals; but to us poor folk they are the useful creatures God has given us for food and work, and they are not playthings."': So I said then; but now, ah, now Marthe, it is different. Do you remember how old Dubois for ever quarrelled with young Baptiste, but when they wrote from the regiment to tell him the boy was dead of fever, during the great manoeuvres, do you remember how the old father mourned, and lay on his bed for a whole day, fasting? So it always is, Marthe. The cow butts the calf with her horns, but when the calf is gone, the mother moans for it all the day."
Firman was too busy with his farm and his new family ties to come much to see his sister, or to notice how rarely she came up to the métairie now. For Suzanne had never forgiven, and that was why Jeanne-Marie walked up so seldom to M. François's métairie.
Did not all the village say that it was Suzanne's doing that Firman's sister left the farm on his marriage? That Suzanne's jealousy had driven Jeanne-Marie away? And when this came to the ears of Firman's wife, and the old folks shook their heads in her presence over the strange doings of young couples now-adays, the relief that the dreaded division of supremacy with her husband's sister was spared her, was lost in anger against JeanneMarie, as the cause of this village scandal. The jealousy that she had always felt for the "chѐre soeur," whom Firman loved and respected, leapt up within her. "People say he loves his sister, and that it is I who part them; they shall see—yes, they shall see."
And bit by bit, with all a woman's subtle diplomacy, she drew her husband away from his sister's affection, until in a year or two their close intimacy had weakened to a gradually slackening friendship.
At
