Never, I think, did reality seem more like a dream. "But who are these
three women?" I asked myself, and, sinking on a bench like one
enchanted, I dreamed that these were three sisters, the remnant of a
noble family who had lost its money during several generations till at
last nothing remained, and the poor old women had to devise some mode
of earning their living. I imagined the scene in some great house
which they would have to leave on the morrow, and they talking
together, thinking they must go forth to beg, till she who played the
fiddle said that something would happen to save them from the shame of
mendicancy. I imagined her saying that their last crust of bread would
not be eaten before some one would come to tell them that a fortune
awaited them. And it so happened that the day they divided this crust
the one to whom faith had been given came upon an old letter. She
stood reading till the others asked her what she was reading with so
much interest. "I told you," she said, "that we should be saved, that
God in His great mercy would not turn us out into the streets to beg.
This letter contains explicit directions how the gavotte used to be
danced when our ancestors lived in the Place des Vosges."
"But what help to us to know the true step of the gavotte?" cried the
youngest sister.
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