When Sylvia was older and had become in a way her mother's confidante, sitting opposite to her in the window to sew until it was no longer possible to save oil for the lamp, she ventured to recall this scene. Her mother had laughed at the remembrance of it and had begun to hum the song her father had sung:
"Shall I ever forget him?" Madame Snow had cried. "It was the day your sister Elène was married, and he had been down to the railway-station to see them off to Bruxelles."
Sylvia had asked what the words of the song meant, and had been told that they meant women were always running around.
"Some of them after men and others running away from them," her mother had replied.
"Shall I do that when I'm big?" Sylvia had continued. "Which shall I do?"
But it had been time to fetch the lamp and the question had remained unanswered.
Sylvia was five when her sister Elène was married; soon afterward Henriette married, too. She remembered that very well, because Marie went to join Françoise in the other bedroom, and with only Marguerite and Valentine left, they no longer slept three in a bed. This association had often been very uncomfortable because Marguerite would eat biscuits, the crumbs of which used to scratch her legs; and worse than the crumbs was the invariable quarrel between Marguerite and Valentine that always ended in their pinching each other across Sylvia, so that she often got pinched by mistake.
For several years Sylvia suffered from being the youngest of many sisters, and her mother's favorite. When she went to school, she asked other girls if it were not nicer to have brothers, but the stories she heard about the behavior of boys made her glad there were only girls in her house. She had practical experience of the ways of boys when at the age of eight she first took part in the annual _féerie_ at the Lille theater. On her first appearance she played a monster; though all the masks were very ugly, she, being the smallest performer, always got the ugliest, and with the progress of the season the one that was most knocked about. In after years these performances seemed like a nightmare of hot cardboard-scented breath, of being hustled down the stone stairs from the dressing-room, of noisy rough boys shouting and scrambling for the best masks, of her legs being pinched, while she was waiting in the wings, by invisible boys, and once of somebody's twisting her mask right round as they made the famous entrance of the monsters, so that, being able to see nothing, she fell down and made all the audience laugh. Such were boys!