But Ellen had never heard of George Sand and knew, beyond his music, very little of Chopin, so it merely confused her to hear Madame Gigon call a man "she." Lest she betray her ignorance she kept silent, and sometimes she did not listen at all, because this ancient talk did not interest her, though it seemed to be the very core of all the life that remained in the blind old woman.
Madame Gigon talked far into the night, with the air of one who had long been shut in solitude, and as she talked her English became more and more clear. She spoke almost as easily as she had spoken in the days, half a century earlier, when she had taken Lily's mother and the other girls of the school on pique-niques in the woods along the Seine at Sèvres. And after a time as the dull glow of her memories took fire, she fell to talking of old Julia Shane herself. But she talked of a Julia Shane who was still a young girl and not the sick old woman who, lying ill in her house among the black mills, was the last link in the chain that held Hattie Tolliver from her children.
And as Madame Gigon talked on and on to the accompaniment of the distant sounds from the misty river, there swept over Ellen a consciousness, new but unmistakable, of a delicate unity running through all of life. It was bound together, somehow, in an intricate web composed of such things as love and memories, hopes and sorrows and sentiment, but it was a web without pattern, without design, a senseless, crazy and beautiful thing. She saw then that she could never exist apart, in isolation, from all these others; there were filaments which bound her even to so remote and insubstantial a creature as this blind old woman. It was the web which made her uneasy. She must be free of it, somewhere, sometime. . . .
Criquette began to wheeze and Madame Gigon prodding him with her toe said, "Heigh-ho! . . . We must go to bed. . . . Even the dogs have begun to snore."
