One evening in March the Jupillons, mother and son, were talking together by the stove in their back-shop.

Jupillon had been drafted. The money his mother had put aside to purchase his release had been used up as a result of six months of poor business and by credits given to certain lorettes on the street, who had left the key under their door-mat one fine morning. He had not prospered, in a business way, himself, and his stock in trade had been taken on execution. He had been that day to ask a former employer to advance him the money to purchase a substitute. But the old perfumer had not forgiven him for leaving him and setting up for himself, and he refused point-blank.

Mere Jupillon, in despair, was complaining tearfully. She repeated the number drawn by her son: “Twenty-two! twenty-two!” And she said: “And yet I sewed a black spider into your paletot with his web; a velvety fellow he was! Oh, dear! I ought to have done as they told me and made you wear the cap you were baptized in. Ah! the good God ain’t fair! There’s the fruit woman’s son drew a lucky number! That comes of being honest! And those two sluts at number eighteen must go and hook it with my money! I might have known they meant something by the way they shook hands. They did me out of more than seven hundred francs, did you know it? And the black creature opposite and that infernal girl as had the face to eat pots of strawberries at twenty francs! they might as well have taken me too, the hussies! But you haven’t gone yet all the same. I’d rather sell the creamery I’ll go out to work again, do cooking or housekeeping, anything! Why, I’d draw money from a stone for you!”

Jupillon smoked and let his mother do the talking. When she had finished, he said: “That’ll do for talk, mamma! all that’s nothing but words. You’ll spoil your digestion and it ain’t worth while. You needn’t sell anything you needn’t strain yourself at all I’ll buy my substitute and it sha’n’t cost you a sou; do you want to bet on it?”

“Jesus!” ejaculated Madame Jupillon.

“I have an idea.”

After a pause, Jupillon continued: “I didn’t want to make trouble with you on account of Germinie you know, at the time the stories about us were going round; you thought it was time for me to break with her that she would be in our way and you kicked her out of the house, stiff. That wasn’t my idea I didn’t think she was so bad as all that for the family butter. But, however, you thought best to do it. And perhaps, after all, you did the best thing; instead of cooling her off, you warmed her up for me yes, warmed her up I’ve met her once or twice and she’s changed, I tell you. Gad! how she’s drying up!”

“But you know very well she hasn’t got a sou.”

“I don’t say she has, of her own. But what’s that got to do with it? She’ll find it somewhere. She’s good for twenty-three hundred shiners yet!”

“But suppose you get mixed up in it?”

“Oh! she won’t steal ’em

“The deuce she won’t!”

“Well! if she does, it won’t be from anyone but her mistress. Do you suppose her mademoiselle would have her pinched for that? She’ll turn her off, and that’ll be the end of it. We’ll advise her to try the air in another quarter off she goes! and we sha’n’t see her again. But it would be too stupid for her to steal. She’ll arrange it somehow, she’ll hunt round and turn things over. I don’t know how, not I! but that’s her affair, you understand. This is the time for her to show her talents. By the way, perhaps you don’t know, they say her old woman’s sick. If the dear lady should happen to step out and leave her all the stuff, as the story goes in the quarter why, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have played see-saw with her, eh, mamma? We must put on gloves, you see, mamma, when we’re dealing with people who may have four or five thousand a year come tumbling into their aprons.”

“Oh! my God! what are you talking about? But after the way I treated her oh! no, she’ll never come back here.”

“Well! I tell you I’ll bring her back and to-night at the latest,” said Jupillon, rising, and rolling a cigarette between his fingers. “No excuses, you know,” he said to his mother, “they won’t do any good and be cold to her. Act as if you received her only on my account, because you are weak. No one knows what may happen, we must always keep an anchor to windward.”