We don't know her outside of school."
"And I don't want to know her. As for you, you love everybody that nobody
else loves." And that was true: Paula was always the friend of the poor and
the despised. In that great school which was a world in miniature, there
were many unfortunate little ones who suffered neglect from their drunken
parents; others were cruelly treated at home, and in the case of still
others, their timidity or physical weakness exposed them to the ridicule of
their comrades. In Paula, however, they all found a friend and a companion
who loved them and defended them.
The capacity to love and to make others happy, extended itself also to the
animals, but not to those small boys who destroyed the birds' nests or
threw stones at the horses or dogs--these she attacked without mercy. In
the neighborhood of "The Convent" where we lived, there were quite a number
of this type of boy whose greatest pleasure was to torture the dogs and
cats. One of these especially, the son of the "Breton," was a veritable
executioner. He never attended school, for his father never bothered with
him, and his mother, poor woman, accustomed to misery and the blows of her
drunken husband, had apparently lost all semblance of human feeling.
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