qUARTIER LATINITIES 58 



does not seem aware of her presence. We find the 

 old woman again at tlie vegetable shop opposite, 

 watehing with her unfaded blaek eyes while a penny- 

 worth of spinaeh, ready cooked, is ladled on to a sheet 

 of paper, weighed, deducted from with a dingy spoon, 

 and handed over in its paper wrapper with the green 

 juice dropping from the ends. Three eggs, no bigger 

 than golf- balls, are her final purchase ; one buys eggs 

 here by their superficial area, and not according to 

 romantic theories of the newly laid, theories that are 

 unassailable by argument and quite unpractical. 

 These are taken from the heap marked eighty centimes, 

 and that they are sold for five sous is a fact that the 

 British mind must accept, but may not hope to grasp. 

 The somersault from counting by sous to counting 

 by centimes is one of the most frequent and shattering 

 episodes of the French market. It may happen to 

 you to be told that of two frying-pans, one is thirty- 

 five centimes and the other nine sous, and the process 

 of determining which is the better bargain results 

 in a mental paralysis that is rendered more complete 

 by the impatience of the shopman, who has neither 

 a kind heart nor a sense of humour. 



The grocer's shop at the corner is doing a steady 

 and arduous trade. Half its wares are outside, 

 labelled attractively in centimes, and the broad blue 

 backs of the housekeepers form a solid bulwark round 

 them, scarcely penetrable even by the furtive and 

 circuitous street dog. In the thronged interior may 

 be discerned at intervals a bonnet, with plumage 

 agitated by conversation, and by violent shocks 

 received from convolutions in the ruck of buyers. 

 By virtue of the compactness of trimming, and a 

 certain cautiousness in the shade of lavender of the 

 ribbon, it is recognisable as an English bonnet, and 

 its wearer as one of a class whose sufferings have too 



