Next to him sat the woman in boy’s clothes; she was pretty in an insipid kind of way, with fair hair, hazel eyes, upper teeth that caught on her lower lip and an anxious and defiant expression.
Desgrez made note of the other persons present; he was particularly impressed by the formidable personalities of two women; by the likeness and the difference in age, he judged them to be mother and daughter — black-browed, with a strong face marked by cunning, self-indulgence and the scarcely healed traces of a virulent skin disease, the elder woman was a most repulsive personality, but she was bravely decked underneath her disguising hood and cloak in green satin trimmed with vermilion ribbons; the woman who appeared to be her daughter was no less brazen in bearing and had not a much larger porti
