'Father is gone,' she said; 'he was a kind man but a queer man.
Priests is queer people, and I don't know who isn't.'
Then after a long pause she told me with seriousness, as if speaking
of a thing that surprised herself, and should surprise me, that she
was very fond of the boys.
In our talk, which is sometimes full of the innocent realism of
childhood, she is always pathetically eager to say the right thing
and be engaging.
One evening I found her trying to light a fire in the little side
room of her cottage, where there is an ordinary fireplace. I went in
to help her and showed her how to hold up a paper before the mouth
of the chimney to make a draught, a method she had never seen. Then
I told her of men who live alone in Paris and make their own fires
that they may have no one to bother them. She was sitting in a heap
on the floor staring into the turf, and as I finished she looked up
with surprise.
'They're like me so,' she said; 'would anyone have thought that!'
Below the sympathy we feel there is still a chasm between us.
'Musha,' she muttered as I was leaving her this evening, 'I think
it's to hell you'll be going by and by.'
Occasionally I meet her also in the kitchen where young men go to
play cards after dark and a few girls slip in to share the
amusement. At such times her eyes shine in the light of the candles,
and her cheeks flush with the first tumult of youth, till she hardly
seems the same girl who sits every evening droning to herself over
the turf.
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