You
are like bees that leave their own clover fields to buzz themselves dead
against the glass of a hothouse."
Bebee smiled, reaching to spread out her linen. But she said nothing.
"What good is it talking to them?" she thought; "they do not know."
Already the neighbors and friends of her infancy seemed so far, far away;
creatures of a distant world, that she had long left; it was no use
talking, they never would understand.
"Antoine should never have taught you your letters," said Reine, groaning
under the great blue shirts she was hanging on high among the leaves. "I
told him so at the time. I said, 'The child is a good child, and spins,
and sews, and sweeps, rare and fine for her age; why go and spoil her?'
But he was always headstrong. Not a child of mine knows a letter, the
saints be praised! nor a word of any tongue but our own good Flemish. You
should have been brought up the same. You would have come to no trouble
then."
"I am in no trouble, dear Reine," said Bebee, scattering the potato-peels
to the clacking poultry, and she smiled into the faces of the golden
oxlips that nodded to her back again in sunshiny sympathy.
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