第518页 / 共896页

Madame Defarge, with her arms folded, sat in the morning light

and heat, contemplating the wine-shop and the street. In both,

there were several knots of loungers, squalid and miserable, but

now with a manifest sense of power enthroned on their distress.

The raggedest nightcap, awry on the wretchedest head, had this

crooked significance in it: "I know how hard it has grown for me,

the wearer of this, to support life in myself; but do you know

how easy it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to destroy life

in you?" Every lean bare arm, that had been without work before,

had this work always ready for it now, that it could strike. The

fingers of the knitting women were vicious, with the experience

that they could tear. There was a change in the appearance of

Saint Antoine; the image had been hammering into this for

hundreds of years, and the last finishing blows had told mightily

on the expression.