initial commit of ebook 2720HEADmain

1 files changed, 2723 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/2720-0.txt b/2720-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..85b8c27
--- /dev/null
+++ b/2720-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,2723 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Pension Beaurepas, by Henry James
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Pension Beaurepas
+
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 29, 2019  [eBook #2720]
+[This file was first posted July 3, 2000]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PENSION BEAUREPAS***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1886 Macmillan and Co. edition.  Scanned by David
+Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org.  Proofing by Emma Hair, Francine Smith and
+Matthew Garrish.
+
+                      [Picture: Public domain cover]
+
+
+
+
+
+                          THE PENSION BEAUREPAS
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+I was not rich—on the contrary; and I had been told the Pension Beaurepas
+was cheap.  I had, moreover, been told that a boarding-house is a capital
+place for the study of human nature.  I had a fancy for a literary
+career, and a friend of mine had said to me, “If you mean to write you
+ought to go and live in a boarding-house; there is no other such place to
+pick up material.”  I had read something of this kind in a letter
+addressed by Stendhal to his sister: “I have a passionate desire to know
+human nature, and have a great mind to live in a boarding-house, where
+people cannot conceal their real characters.”  I was an admirer of _La
+Chartreuse de Parme_, and it appeared to me that one could not do better
+than follow in the footsteps of its author.  I remembered, too, the
+magnificent boarding-house in Balzac’s Père Goriot,—the “_pension
+bourgeoise des deux sexes et autres_,” kept by Madame Vauquer, _née_ De
+Conflans.  Magnificent, I mean, as a piece of portraiture; the
+establishment, as an establishment, was certainly sordid enough, and I
+hoped for better things from the Pension Beaurepas.  This institution was
+one of the most esteemed in Geneva, and, standing in a little garden of
+its own, not far from the lake, had a very homely, comfortable, sociable
+aspect.  The regular entrance was, as one might say, at the back, which
+looked upon the street, or rather upon a little _place_, adorned like
+every place in Geneva, great or small, with a fountain.  This fact was
+not prepossessing, for on crossing the threshold you found yourself more
+or less in the kitchen, encompassed with culinary odours.  This, however,
+was no great matter, for at the Pension Beaurepas there was no attempt at
+gentility or at concealment of the domestic machinery.  The latter was of
+a very simple sort.  Madame Beaurepas was an excellent little old
+woman—she was very far advanced in life, and had been keeping a pension
+for forty years—whose only faults were that she was slightly deaf, that
+she was fond of a surreptitious pinch of snuff, and that, at the age of
+seventy-three, she wore flowers in her cap.  There was a tradition in the
+house that she was not so deaf as she pretended; that she feigned this
+infirmity in order to possess herself of the secrets of her lodgers.  But
+I never subscribed to this theory; I am convinced that Madame Beaurepas
+had outlived the period of indiscreet curiosity.  She was a philosopher,
+on a matter-of-fact basis; she had been having lodgers for forty years,
+and all that she asked of them was that they should pay their bills, make
+use of the door-mat, and fold their napkins.  She cared very little for
+their secrets.  “J’en ai vus de toutes les couleurs,” she said to me.
+She had quite ceased to care for individuals; she cared only for types,
+for categories.  Her large observation had made her acquainted with a
+great number, and her mind was a complete collection of “heads.”  She
+flattered herself that she knew at a glance where to pigeon-hole a
+new-comer, and if she made any mistakes her deportment never betrayed
+them.  I think that, as regards individuals, she had neither likes nor
+dislikes; but she was capable of expressing esteem or contempt for a
+species.  She had her own ways, I suppose, of manifesting her approval,
+but her manner of indicating the reverse was simple and unvarying.  “Je
+trouve que c’est déplacé”—this exhausted her view of the matter.  If one
+of her inmates had put arsenic into the _pot-au-feu_, I believe Madame
+Beaurepas would have contented herself with remarking that the proceeding
+was out of place.  The line of misconduct to which she most objected was
+an undue assumption of gentility; she had no patience with boarders who
+gave themselves airs.  “When people come _chez moi_, it is not to cut a
+figure in the world; I have never had that illusion,” I remember hearing
+her say; “and when you pay seven francs a day, _tout compris_, it
+comprises everything but the right to look down upon the others.  But
+there are people who, the less they pay, the more they take themselves
+_au sérieux_.  My most difficult boarders have always been those who have
+had the little rooms.”
+
+Madame Beaurepas had a niece, a young woman of some forty odd years; and
+the two ladies, with the assistance of a couple of thick-waisted,
+red-armed peasant women, kept the house going.  If on your exits and
+entrances you peeped into the kitchen, it made very little difference;
+for Célestine, the cook, had no pretension to be an invisible functionary
+or to deal in occult methods.  She was always at your service, with a
+grateful grin she blacked your boots; she trudged off to fetch a cab; she
+would have carried your baggage, if you had allowed her, on her broad
+little back.  She was always tramping in and out, between her kitchen and
+the fountain in the place, where it often seemed to me that a large part
+of the preparation for our dinner went forward—the wringing out of towels
+and table-cloths, the washing of potatoes and cabbages, the scouring of
+saucepans and cleansing of water-bottles.  You enjoyed, from the
+doorstep, a perpetual back-view of Célestine and of her large, loose,
+woollen ankles, as she craned, from the waist, over into the fountain and
+dabbled in her various utensils.  This sounds as if life went on in a
+very make-shift fashion at the Pension Beaurepas—as if the tone of the
+establishment were sordid.  But such was not at all the case.  We were
+simply very _bourgeois_; we practised the good old Genevese principle of
+not sacrificing to appearances.  This is an excellent principle—when you
+have the reality.  We had the reality at the Pension Beaurepas: we had it
+in the shape of soft short beds, equipped with fluffy _duvets_; of
+admirable coffee, served to us in the morning by Célestine in person, as
+we lay recumbent on these downy couches; of copious, wholesome, succulent
+dinners, conformable to the best provincial traditions.  For myself, I
+thought the Pension Beaurepas picturesque, and this, with me, at that
+time was a great word.  I was young and ingenuous: I had just come from
+America.  I wished to perfect myself in the French tongue, and I
+innocently believed that it flourished by Lake Leman.  I used to go to
+lectures at the Academy, and come home with a violent appetite.  I always
+enjoyed my morning walk across the long bridge (there was only one, just
+there, in those days) which spans the deep blue out-gush of the lake, and
+up the dark steep streets of the old Calvinistic city.  The garden faced
+this way, toward the lake and the old town; and this was the pleasantest
+approach to the house.  There was a high wall, with a double gate in the
+middle, flanked by a couple of ancient massive posts; the big rusty
+_grille_ contained some old-fashioned iron-work.  The garden was rather
+mouldy and weedy, tangled and untended; but it contained a little
+thin-flowing fountain, several green benches, a rickety little table of
+the same complexion, and three orange-trees, in tubs, which were
+deposited as effectively as possible in front of the windows of the
+_salon_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+As commonly happens in boarding-houses, the rustle of petticoats was, at
+the Pension Beaurepas, the most familiar form of the human tread.  There
+was the usual allotment of economical widows and old maids, and to
+maintain the balance of the sexes there were only an old Frenchman and a
+young American.  It hardly made the matter easier that the old Frenchman
+came from Lausanne.  He was a native of that estimable town, but he had
+once spent six months in Paris, he had tasted of the tree of knowledge;
+he had got beyond Lausanne, whose resources he pronounced inadequate.
+Lausanne, as he said, “_manquait d’agréments_.”  When obliged, for
+reasons which he never specified, to bring his residence in Paris to a
+close, he had fallen back on Geneva; he had broken his fall at the
+Pension Beaurepas.  Geneva was, after all, more like Paris, and at a
+Genevese boarding-house there was sure to be plenty of Americans with
+whom one could talk about the French metropolis.  M. Pigeonneau was a
+little lean man, with a large narrow nose, who sat a great deal in the
+garden, reading with the aid of a large magnifying glass a volume from
+the _cabinet de lecture_.
+
+One day, a fortnight after my arrival at the Pension Beaurepas, I came
+back, rather earlier than usual from my academic session; it wanted half
+an hour of the midday breakfast.  I went into the salon with the design
+of possessing myself of the day’s _Galignani_ before one of the little
+English old maids should have removed it to her virginal bower—a
+privilege to which Madame Beaurepas frequently alluded as one of the
+attractions of the establishment.  In the salon I found a new-comer, a
+tall gentleman in a high black hat, whom I immediately recognised as a
+compatriot.  I had often seen him, or his equivalent, in the hotel
+parlours of my native land.  He apparently supposed himself to be at the
+present moment in a hotel parlour; his hat was on his head, or, rather,
+half off it—pushed back from his forehead, and rather suspended than
+poised.  He stood before a table on which old newspapers were scattered,
+one of which he had taken up and, with his eye-glass on his nose, was
+holding out at arm’s-length.  It was that honourable but extremely
+diminutive sheet, the _Journal de Genève_, a newspaper of about the size
+of a pocket-handkerchief.  As I drew near, looking for my _Galignani_,
+the tall gentleman gave me, over the top of his eye-glass, a somewhat
+solemn stare.  Presently, however, before I had time to lay my hand on
+the object of my search, he silently offered me the _Journal de Genève_.
+
+“It appears,” he said, “to be the paper of the country.”
+
+“Yes,” I answered, “I believe it’s the best.”
+
+He gazed at it again, still holding it at arm’s-length, as if it had been
+a looking-glass.  “Well,” he said, “I suppose it’s natural a small
+country should have small papers.  You could wrap it up, mountains and
+all, in one of our dailies!”
+
+I found my _Galignani_, and went off with it into the garden, where I
+seated myself on a bench in the shade.  Presently I saw the tall
+gentleman in the hat appear in one of the open windows of the salon, and
+stand there with his hands in his pockets and his legs a little apart.
+He looked very much bored, and—I don’t know why—I immediately began to
+feel sorry for him.  He was not at all a picturesque personage; he looked
+like a jaded, faded man of business.  But after a little he came into the
+garden and began to stroll about; and then his restless, unoccupied
+carriage, and the vague, unacquainted manner in which his eyes wandered
+over the place, seemed to make it proper that, as an older resident, I
+should exercise a certain hospitality.  I said something to him, and he
+came and sat down beside me on my bench, clasping one of his long knees
+in his hands.
+
+“When is it this big breakfast of theirs comes off?” he inquired.
+“That’s what I call it—the little breakfast and the big breakfast.  I
+never thought I should live to see the time when I should care to eat two
+breakfasts.  But a man’s glad to do anything over here.”
+
+“For myself,” I observed, “I find plenty to do.”
+
+He turned his head and glanced at me with a dry, deliberate, kind-looking
+eye.  “You’re getting used to the life, are you?”
+
+“I like the life very much,” I answered, laughing.
+
+“How long have you tried it?”
+
+“Do you mean in this place?”
+
+“Well, I mean anywhere.  It seems to me pretty much the same all over.”
+
+“I have been in this house only a fortnight,” I said.
+
+“Well, what should you say, from what you have seen?” my companion asked.
+
+“Oh,” said I, “you can see all there is immediately.  It’s very simple.”
+
+“Sweet simplicity, eh?  I’m afraid my two ladies will find it too
+simple.”
+
+“Everything is very good,” I went on.  “And Madame Beaurepas is a
+charming old woman.  And then it’s very cheap.”
+
+“Cheap, is it?” my friend repeated meditatively.
+
+“Doesn’t it strike you so?” I asked.  I thought it very possible he had
+not inquired the terms.  But he appeared not to have heard me; he sat
+there, clasping his knee and blinking, in a contemplative manner, at the
+sunshine.
+
+“Are you from the United States, sir?” he presently demanded, turning his
+head again.
+
+“Yes, sir,” I replied; and I mentioned the place of my nativity.
+
+“I presumed,” he said, “that you were American or English.  I’m from the
+United States myself; from New York city.  Many of our people here?”
+
+“Not so many as, I believe, there have sometimes been.  There are two or
+three ladies.”
+
+“Well,” my interlocutor declared, “I am very fond of ladies’ society.  I
+think when it’s superior there’s nothing comes up to it.  I’ve got two
+ladies here myself; I must make you acquainted with them.”
+
+I rejoined that I should be delighted, and I inquired of my friend
+whether he had been long in Europe.
+
+“Well, it seems precious long,” he said, “but my time’s not up yet.  We
+have been here fourteen weeks and a half.”
+
+“Are you travelling for pleasure?” I asked.
+
+My companion turned his head again and looked at me—looked at me so long
+in silence that I at last also turned and met his eyes.
+
+“No, sir,” he said presently.  “No, sir,” he repeated, after a
+considerable interval.
+
+“Excuse me,” said I, for there was something so solemn in his tone that I
+feared I had been indiscreet.
+
+He took no notice of my ejaculation; he simply continued to look at me.
+“I’m travelling,” he said, at last, “to please the doctors.  They seemed
+to think they would like it.”
+
+“Ah, they sent you abroad for your health?”
+
+“They sent me abroad because they were so confoundedly muddled they
+didn’t know what else to do.”
+
+“That’s often the best thing,” I ventured to remark.
+
+“It was a confession of weakness; they wanted me to stop plaguing them.
+They didn’t know enough to cure me, and that’s the way they thought they
+would get round it.  I wanted to be cured—I didn’t want to be
+transported.  I hadn’t done any harm.”
+
+I assented to the general proposition of the inefficiency of doctors, and
+asked my companion if he had been seriously ill.
+
+“I didn’t sleep,” he said, after some delay.
+
+“Ah, that’s very annoying.  I suppose you were overworked.”
+
+“I didn’t eat; I took no interest in my food.”
+
+“Well, I hope you both eat and sleep now,” I said.
+
+“I couldn’t hold a pen,” my neighbour went on.  “I couldn’t sit still.  I
+couldn’t walk from my house to the cars—and it’s only a little way.  I
+lost my interest in business.”
+
+“You needed a holiday,” I observed.
+
+“That’s what the doctors said.  It wasn’t so very smart of them.  I had
+been paying strict attention to business for twenty-three years.”
+
+“In all that time you have never had a holiday?” I exclaimed with horror.
+
+My companion waited a little.  “Sundays,” he said at last.
+
+“No wonder, then, you were out of sorts.”
+
+“Well, sir,” said my friend, “I shouldn’t have been where I was three
+years ago if I had spent my time travelling round Europe.  I was in a
+very advantageous position.  I did a very large business.  I was
+considerably interested in lumber.”  He paused, turned his head, and
+looked at me a moment.  “Have you any business interests yourself?”  I
+answered that I had none, and he went on again, slowly, softly,
+deliberately.  “Well, sir, perhaps you are not aware that business in the
+United States is not what it was a short time since.  Business interests
+are very insecure.  There seems to be a general falling-off.  Different
+parties offer different explanations of the fact, but so far as I am
+aware none of their observations have set things going again.”  I
+ingeniously intimated that if business was dull, the time was good for
+coming away; whereupon my neighbour threw back his head and stretched his
+legs a while.  “Well, sir, that’s one view of the matter certainly.
+There’s something to be said for that.  These things should be looked at
+all round.  That’s the ground my wife took.  That’s the ground,” he added
+in a moment, “that a lady would naturally take;” and he gave a little dry
+laugh.
+
+“You think it’s slightly illogical,” I remarked.
+
+“Well, sir, the ground I took was, that the worse a man’s business is,
+the more it requires looking after.  I shouldn’t want to go out to take a
+walk—not even to go to church—if my house was on fire.  My firm is not
+doing the business it was; it’s like a sick child, it requires nursing.
+What I wanted the doctors to do was to fix me up, so that I could go on
+at home.  I’d have taken anything they’d have given me, and as many times
+a day.  I wanted to be right there; I had my reasons; I have them still.
+But I came off all the same,” said my friend, with a melancholy smile.
+
+I was a great deal younger than he, but there was something so simple and
+communicative in his tone, so expressive of a desire to fraternise, and
+so exempt from any theory of human differences, that I quite forgot his
+seniority, and found myself offering him paternal I advice.  “Don’t think
+about all that,” said I.  “Simply enjoy yourself, amuse yourself, get
+well.  Travel about and see Europe.  At the end of a year, by the time
+you are ready to go home, things will have improved over there, and you
+will be quite well and happy.”
+
+My friend laid his hand on my knee; he looked at me for some moments, and
+I thought he was going to say, “You are very young!”  But he said
+presently, “_You_ have got used to Europe any way!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+At breakfast I encountered his ladies—his wife and daughter.  They were
+placed, however, at a distance from me, and it was not until the
+_pensionnaires_ had dispersed, and some of them, according to custom, had
+come out into the garden, that he had an opportunity of making me
+acquainted with them.
+
+“Will you allow me to introduce you to my daughter?” he said, moved
+apparently by a paternal inclination to provide this young lady with
+social diversion.  She was standing with her mother, in one of the paths,
+looking about with no great complacency, as I imagined, at the homely
+characteristics of the place, and old M. Pigeonneau was hovering near,
+hesitating apparently between the desire to be urbane and the absence of
+a pretext.  “Mrs. Ruck—Miss Sophy Ruck,” said my friend, leading me up.
+
+Mrs. Ruck was a large, plump, light-coloured person, with a smooth fair
+face, a somnolent eye, and an elaborate coiffure.  Miss Sophy was a girl
+of one-and-twenty, very small and very pretty—what I suppose would have
+been called a lively brunette.  Both of these ladies were attired in
+black silk dresses, very much trimmed; they had an air of the highest
+elegance.
+
+“Do you think highly of this pension?” inquired Mrs. Ruck, after a few
+preliminaries.
+
+“It’s a little rough, but it seems to me comfortable,” I answered.
+
+“Does it take a high rank in Geneva?” Mrs. Ruck pursued.
+
+“I imagine it enjoys a very fair fame,” I said, smiling.
+
+“I should never dream of comparing it to a New York boarding-house,” said
+Mrs. Ruck.
+
+“It’s quite a different style,” her daughter observed.
+
+Miss Ruck had folded her arms; she was holding her elbows with a pair of
+white little hands, and she was tapping the ground with a pretty little
+foot.
+
+“We hardly expected to come to a pension,” said Mrs. Ruck.  “But we
+thought we would try; we had heard so much about Swiss pensions.  I was
+saying to Mr. Ruck that I wondered whether this was a favourable
+specimen.  I was afraid we might have made a mistake.”
+
+“We knew some people who had been here; they thought everything of Madame
+Beaurepas,” said Miss Sophy.  “They said she was a real friend.”
+
+“Mr. and Mrs. Parker—perhaps you have heard her speak of them,” Mrs. Ruck
+pursued.
+
+“Madame Beaurepas has had a great many Americans; she is very fond of
+Americans,” I replied.
+
+“Well, I must say I should think she would be, if she compares them with
+some others.”
+
+“Mother is always comparing,” observed Miss Ruck.
+
+“Of course I am always comparing,” rejoined the elder lady.  “I never had
+a chance till now; I never knew my privileges.  Give me an American!”
+And Mrs. Ruck indulged in a little laugh.
+
+“Well, I must say there are some things I like over here,” said Miss
+Sophy, with courage.  And indeed I could see that she was a young woman
+of great decision.
+
+“You like the shops—that’s what you like,” her father affirmed.
+
+The young lady addressed herself to me, without heeding this remark.  “I
+suppose you feel quite at home here.”
+
+“Oh, he likes it; he has got used to the life!” exclaimed Mr. Ruck.
+
+“I wish you’d teach Mr. Ruck,” said his wife.  “It seems as if he
+couldn’t get used to anything.”
+
+“I’m used to you, my dear,” the husband retorted, giving me a humorous
+look.
+
+“He’s intensely restless,” continued Mrs. Ruck.
+
+“That’s what made me want to come to a pension.  I thought he would
+settle down more.”
+
+“I don’t think I _am_ used to you, after all,” said her husband.
+
+In view of a possible exchange of conjugal repartee I took refuge in
+conversation with Miss Ruck, who seemed perfectly able to play her part
+in any colloquy.  I learned from this young lady that, with her parents,
+after visiting the British Islands, she had been spending a month in
+Paris, and that she thought she should have died when she left that city.
+“I hung out of the carriage, when we left the hotel,” said Miss Ruck, “I
+assure you I did.  And mother did, too.”
+
+“Out of the other window, I hope,” said I.
+
+“Yes, one out of each window,” she replied promptly.  “Father had hard
+work, I can tell you.  We hadn’t half finished; there were ever so many
+places we wanted to go to.”
+
+“Your father insisted on coming away?”
+
+“Yes; after we had been there about a month he said he had enough.  He’s
+fearfully restless; he’s very much out of health.  Mother and I said to
+him that if he was restless in Paris he needn’t hope for peace anywhere.
+We don’t mean to leave him alone till he takes us back.”  There was an
+air of keen resolution in Miss Ruck’s pretty face, of lucid apprehension
+of desirable ends, which made me, as she pronounced these words, direct a
+glance of covert compassion toward her poor recalcitrant father.  He had
+walked away a little with his wife, and I saw only his back and his
+stooping, patient-looking shoulders, whose air of acute resignation was
+thrown into relief by the voluminous tranquillity of Mrs. Ruck.  “He will
+have to take us back in September, any way,” the young girl pursued; “he
+will have to take us back to get some things we have ordered.”
+
+“Have you ordered a great many things?” I asked jocosely.
+
+“Well, I guess we have ordered _some_.  Of course we wanted to take
+advantage of being in Paris—ladies always do.  We have left the principal
+things till we go back.  Of course that is the principal interest, for
+ladies.  Mother said she should feel so shabby if she just passed
+through.  We have promised all the people to be back in September, and I
+never broke a promise yet.  So Mr. Ruck has got to make his plans
+accordingly.”
+
+“And what are his plans?”
+
+“I don’t know; he doesn’t seem able to make any.  His great idea was to
+get to Geneva; but now that he has got here he doesn’t seem to care.
+It’s the effect of ill health.  He used to be so bright; but now he is
+quite subdued.  It’s about time he should improve, any way.  We went out
+last night to look at the jewellers’ windows—in that street behind the
+hotel.  I had always heard of those jewellers’ windows.  We saw some
+lovely things, but it didn’t seem to rouse father.  He’ll get tired of
+Geneva sooner than he did of Paris.”
+
+“Ah,” said I, “there are finer things here than the jewellers’ windows.
+We are very near some of the most beautiful scenery in Europe.”
+
+“I suppose you mean the mountains.  Well, we have seen plenty of
+mountains at home.  We used to go to the mountains every summer.  We are
+familiar enough with the mountains.  Aren’t we, mother?” the young lady
+demanded, appealing to Mrs. Ruck, who, with her husband, had drawn near
+again.
+
+“Aren’t we what?” inquired the elder lady.
+
+“Aren’t we familiar with the mountains?”
+
+“Well, I hope so,” said Mrs. Ruck.
+
+Mr. Ruck, with his hands in his pockets, gave me a sociable
+wink.—“There’s nothing much you can tell them!” he said.
+
+The two ladies stood face to face a few moments, surveying each other’s
+garments.  “Don’t you want to go out?” the young girl at last inquired of
+her mother.
+
+“Well, I think we had better; we have got to go up to that place.”
+
+“To what place?” asked Mr. Ruck.
+
+“To that jeweller’s—to that big one.”
+
+“They all seemed big enough; they were too big!”  And Mr. Ruck gave me
+another wink.
+
+“That one where we saw the blue cross,” said his daughter.
+
+“Oh, come, what do you want of that blue cross?” poor Mr. Ruck demanded.
+
+“She wants to hang it on a black velvet ribbon and tie it round her
+neck,” said his wife.
+
+“A black velvet ribbon?  No, I thank you!” cried the young lady.  “Do you
+suppose I would wear that cross on a black velvet ribbon?  On a nice
+little gold chain, if you please—a little narrow gold chain, like an
+old-fashioned watch-chain.  That’s the proper thing for that blue cross.
+I know the sort of chain I mean; I’m going to look for one.  When I want
+a thing,” said Miss Ruck, with decision, “I can generally find it.”
+
+“Look here, Sophy,” her father urged, “you don’t want that blue cross.”
+
+“I do want it—I happen to want it.”  And Sophy glanced at me with a
+little laugh.
+
+Her laugh, which in itself was pretty, suggested that there were various
+relations in which one might stand to Miss Ruck; but I think I was
+conscious of a certain satisfaction in not occupying the paternal one.
+“Don’t worry the poor child,” said her mother.
+
+“Come on, mother,” said Miss Ruck.
+
+“We are going to look about a little,” explained the elder lady to me, by
+way of taking leave.
+
+“I know what that means,” remarked Mr. Ruck, as his companions moved
+away.  He stood looking at them a moment, while he raised his hand to his
+head, behind, and stood rubbing it a little, with a movement that
+displaced his hat.  (I may remark in parenthesis that I never saw a hat
+more easily displaced than Mr. Ruck’s.)  I supposed he was going to say
+something querulous, but I was mistaken.  Mr. Ruck was unhappy, but he
+was very good-natured.  “Well, they want to pick up something,” he said.
+“That’s the principal interest, for ladies.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+Mr. Ruck distinguished me, as the French say.  He honoured me with his
+esteem, and, as the days elapsed, with a large portion of his confidence.
+Sometimes he bored me a little, for the tone of his conversation was not
+cheerful, tending as it did almost exclusively to a melancholy dirge over
+the financial prostration of our common country.  “No, sir, business in
+the United States is not what it once was,” he found occasion to remark
+several times a day.  “There’s not the same spring—there’s not the same
+hopeful feeling.  You can see it in all departments.”  He used to sit by
+the hour in the little garden of the pension, with a roll of American
+newspapers in his lap and his high hat pushed back, swinging one of his
+long legs and reading the _New York Herald_.  He paid a daily visit to
+the American banker’s, on the other side of the Rhône, and remained there
+a long time, turning over the old papers on the green velvet table in the
+middle of the Salon des Étrangers, and fraternising with chance
+compatriots.  But in spite of these diversions his time hung heavily upon
+his hands.  I used sometimes to propose to him to take a walk; but he had
+a mortal horror of pedestrianism, and regarded my own taste for it as’ a
+morbid form of activity.  “You’ll kill yourself, if you don’t look out,”
+he said, “walking all over the country.  I don’t want to walk round that
+way; I ain’t a postman!”  Briefly speaking, Mr. Ruck had few resources.
+His wife and daughter, on the other hand, it was to be supposed, were
+possessed of a good many that could not be apparent to an unobtrusive
+young man.  They also sat a great deal in the garden or in the salon,
+side by side, with folded hands, contemplating material objects, and were
+remarkably independent of most of the usual feminine aids to
+idleness—light literature, tapestry, the use of the piano.  They were,
+however, much fonder of locomotion than their companion, and I often met
+them in the Rue du Rhône and on the quays, loitering in front of the
+jewellers’ windows.  They might have had a cavalier in the person of old
+M. Pigeonneau, who possessed a high appreciation of their charms, but
+who, owing to the absence of a common idiom, was deprived of the
+pleasures of intimacy.  He knew no English, and Mrs. Ruck and her
+daughter had, as it seemed, an incurable mistrust of the beautiful tongue
+which, as the old man endeavoured to impress upon them, was pre-eminently
+the language of conversation.
+
+“They have a _tournure de princesse_—a _distinction supreme_,” he said to
+me.  “One is surprised to find them in a little pension, at seven francs
+a day.”
+
+“Oh, they don’t come for economy,” I answered.  “They must be rich.”
+
+“They don’t come for my _beaux yeux_—for mine,” said M. Pigeonneau,
+sadly.  “Perhaps it’s for yours, young man.  Je vous recommande la mère.”
+
+I reflected a moment.  “They came on account of Mr. Ruck—because at
+hotels he’s so restless.”
+
+M. Pigeonneau gave me a knowing nod.  “Of course he is, with such a wife
+as that—a _femme superbe_.  Madame Ruck is preserved in perfection—a
+miraculous _fraïcheur_.  I like those large, fair, quiet women; they are
+often, _dans l’intimité_, the most agreeable.  I’ll warrant you that at
+heart Madame Ruck is a finished coquette.”
+
+“I rather doubt it,” I said.
+
+“You suppose her cold?  Ne vous y fiez pas!”
+
+“It is a matter in which I have nothing at stake.”
+
+“You young Americans are droll,” said M. Pigeonneau; “you never have
+anything at stake! But the little one, for example; I’ll warrant you
+she’s not cold.  She is admirably made.”
+
+“She is very pretty.”
+
+“‘She is very pretty!’  Vous dites cela d’un ton!  When you pay
+compliments to Mademoiselle Ruck, I hope that’s not the way you do it.”
+
+“I don’t pay compliments to Mademoiselle Ruck.”
+
+“Ah, decidedly,” said M. Pigeonneau, “you young Americans are droll!”
+
+I should have suspected that these two ladies would not especially
+commend themselves to Madame Beaurepas; that as a _maîtresse de salon_,
+which she in some degree aspired to be, she would have found them wanting
+in a certain flexibility of deportment.  But I should have gone quite
+wrong; Madame Beaurepas had no fault at all to find with her new
+pensionnaires.  “I have no observation whatever to make about them,” she
+said to me one evening.  “I see nothing in those ladies which is at all
+_déplacé_.  They don’t complain of anything; they don’t meddle; they take
+what’s given them; they leave me tranquil.  The Americans are often like
+that.  Often, but not always,” Madame Beaurepas pursued.  “We are to have
+a specimen to-morrow of a very different sort.”
+
+“An American?” I inquired.
+
+“Two _Américaines_—a mother and a daughter.  There are Americans and
+Americans: when you are _difficiles_, you are more so than any one, and
+when you have pretensions—ah, _per exemple_, it’s serious.  I foresee
+that with this little lady everything will be serious, beginning with her
+_café au lait_.  She has been staying at the Pension Chamousset—my
+_concurrent_, you know, farther up the street; but she is coming away
+because the coffee is bad.  She holds to her coffee, it appears.  I don’t
+know what liquid Madame Chamousset may have invented, but we will do the
+best we can for her.  Only, I know she will make me _des histoires_ about
+something else.  She will demand a new lamp for the salon; _vous alles
+voir cela_.  She wishes to pay but eleven francs a day for herself and
+her daughter, _tout compris_; and for their eleven francs they expect to
+be lodged like princesses.  But she is very ‘ladylike’—isn’t that what
+you call it in English?  Oh, _pour cela_, she is ladylike!”
+
+I caught a glimpse on the morrow of this ladylike person, who was
+arriving at her new residence as I came in from a walk.  She had come in
+a cab, with her daughter and her luggage; and, with an air of perfect
+softness and serenity, she was disputing the fare as she stood among her
+boxes, on the steps.  She addressed her cabman in a very English accent,
+but with extreme precision and correctness.  “I wish to be perfectly
+reasonable, but I don’t wish to encourage you in exorbitant demands.
+With a franc and a half you are sufficiently paid.  It is not the custom
+at Geneva to give a _pour-boire_ for so short a drive.  I have made
+inquiries, and I find it is not the custom, even in the best families.  I
+am a stranger, yes, but I always adopt the custom of the native families.
+I think it my duty toward the natives.”
+
+“But I am a native, too, _moi_!” said the cabman, with an angry laugh.
+
+“You seem to me to speak with a German accent,” continued the lady.  “You
+are probably from Basel.  A franc and a half is sufficient.  I see you
+have left behind the little red bag which I asked you to hold between
+your knees; you will please to go back to the other house and get it.
+Very well, if you are impolite I will make a complaint of you to-morrow
+at the administration.  Aurora, you will find a pencil in the outer
+pocket of my embroidered satchel; please to write down his number,—87; do
+you see it distinctly?—in case we should forget it.”
+
+The young lady addressed as “Aurora”—a slight, fair girl, holding a large
+parcel of umbrellas—stood at hand while this allocution went forward, but
+she apparently gave no heed to it.  She stood looking about her, in a
+listless manner, at the front of the house, at the corridor, at Célestine
+tucking up her apron in the doorway, at me as I passed in amid the
+disseminated luggage; her mother’s parsimonious attitude seeming to
+produce in Miss Aurora neither sympathy nor embarrassment.  At dinner the
+two ladies were placed on the same side of the table as myself, below
+Mrs. Ruck and her daughter, my own position being on the right of Mr.
+Ruck.  I had therefore little observation of Mrs. Church—such I learned
+to be her name—but I occasionally heard her soft, distinct voice.
+
+“White wine, if you please; we prefer white wine.  There is none on the
+table?  Then you will please to get some, and to remember to place a
+bottle of it always here, between my daughter and myself.”
+
+“That lady seems to know what she wants,” said Mr. Ruck, “and she speaks
+so I can understand her.  I can’t understand every one, over here.  I
+should like to make that lady’s acquaintance.  Perhaps she knows what _I_
+want, too; it seems hard to find out.  But I don’t want any of their sour
+white wine; that’s one of the things I don’t want.  I expect she’ll be an
+addition to the pension.”
+
+Mr. Ruck made the acquaintance of Mrs. Church that evening in the
+parlour, being presented to her by his wife, who presumed on the rights
+conferred upon herself by the mutual proximity, at table, of the two
+ladies.  I suspected that in Mrs. Church’s view Mrs. Ruck presumed too
+far.  The fugitive from the Pension Chamousset, as M. Pigeonneau called
+her, was a little fresh, plump, comely woman, looking less than her age,
+with a round, bright, serious face.  She was very simply and frugally
+dressed, not at all in the manner of Mr. Ruck’s companions, and she had
+an air of quiet distinction which was an excellent defensive weapon.  She
+exhibited a polite disposition to listen to what Mr. Ruck might have to
+say, but her manner was equivalent to an intimation that what she valued
+least in boarding-house life was its social opportunities.  She had
+placed herself near a lamp, after carefully screwing it and turning it
+up, and she had opened in her lap, with the assistance of a large
+embroidered marker, an octavo volume, which I perceived to be in German.
+To Mrs. Ruck and her daughter she was evidently a puzzle, with her
+economical attire and her expensive culture.  The two younger ladies,
+however, had begun to fraternise very freely, and Miss Ruck presently
+went wandering out of the room with her arm round the waist of Miss
+Church.  It was a very warm evening; the long windows of the salon stood
+wide open into the garden, and, inspired by the balmy darkness, M.
+Pigeonneau and Mademoiselle Beaurepas, a most obliging little woman, who
+lisped and always wore a huge cravat, declared they would organise a
+_fête de nuit_.  They engaged in this undertaking, and the fête developed
+itself, consisting of half-a-dozen red paper lanterns, hung about on the
+trees, and of several glasses of _sirop_, carried on a tray by the
+stout-armed Célestine.  As the festival deepened to its climax I went out
+into the garden, where M. Pigeonneau was master of ceremonies.
+
+“But where are those charming young ladies,” he cried, “Miss Ruck and the
+new-comer, _l’aimable transfuge_?  Their absence has been remarked, and
+they are wanting to the brilliancy of the occasion.  _Voyez_ I have
+selected a glass of syrup—a generous glass—for Mademoiselle Ruck, and I
+advise you, my young friend, if you wish to make a good impression, to
+put aside one which you may offer to the other young lady.  What is her
+name?  Miss Church.  I see; it’s a singular name.  There is a church in
+which I would willingly worship!”
+
+Mr. Ruck presently came out of the salon, having concluded his interview
+with Mrs. Church.  Through the open window I saw the latter lady sitting
+under the lamp with her German octavo, while Mrs. Ruck, established,
+empty-handed, in an arm-chair near her, gazed at her with an air of
+fascination.
+
+“Well, I told you she would know what I want,” said Mr. Ruck.  “She says
+I want to go up to Appenzell, wherever that is; that I want to drink whey
+and live in a high latitude—what did she call it?—a high altitude.  She
+seemed to think we ought to leave for Appenzell to-morrow; she’d got it
+all fixed.  She says this ain’t a high enough lat—a high enough altitude.
+And she says I mustn’t go too high either; that would be just as bad; she
+seems to know just the right figure.  She says she’ll give me a list of
+the hotels where we must stop, on the way to Appenzell.  I asked her if
+she didn’t want to go with as, but she says she’d rather sit still and
+read.  I expect she’s a big reader.”
+
+The daughter of this accomplished woman now reappeared, in company with
+Miss Ruck, with whom she had been strolling through the outlying parts of
+the garden.
+
+“Well,” said Miss Ruck, glancing at the red paper lanterns, “are they
+trying to stick the flower-pots into the trees?”
+
+“It’s an illumination in honour of our arrival,” the other young girl
+rejoined.  “It’s a triumph over Madame Chamousset.”
+
+“Meanwhile, at the Pension Chamousset,” I ventured to suggest, “they have
+put out their lights; they are sitting in darkness, lamenting your
+departure.”
+
+She looked at me, smiling; she was standing in the light that came from
+the house.  M. Pigeonneau, meanwhile, who had been awaiting his chance,
+advanced to Miss Ruck with his glass of syrup.  “I have kept it for you,
+Mademoiselle,” he said; “I have jealously guarded it.  It is very
+delicious!”
+
+Miss Ruck looked at him and his syrup, without any motion to take the
+glass.  “Well, I guess it’s sour,” she said in a moment; and she gave a
+little shake of her head.
+
+M. Pigeonneau stood staring with his syrup in his hand; then he slowly
+turned away.  He looked about at the rest of us, as if to appeal from
+Miss Ruck’s insensibility, and went to deposit his rejected tribute on a
+bench.
+
+“Won’t you give it to me?” asked Miss Church, in faultless French.
+“J’adore le sirop, moi.”
+
+M. Pigeonneau came back with alacrity, and presented the glass with a
+very low bow.  “I adore good manners,” murmured the old man.
+
+This incident caused me to look at Miss Church with quickened interest.
+She was not strikingly pretty, but in her charming irregular face there
+was something brilliant and ardent.  Like her mother, she was very simply
+dressed.
+
+“She wants to go to America, and her mother won’t let her,” said Miss
+Sophy to me, explaining her companion’s situation.
+
+“I am very sorry—for America,” I answered, laughing.
+
+“Well, I don’t want to say anything against your mother, but I think it’s
+shameful,” Miss Ruck pursued.
+
+“Mamma has very good reasons; she will tell you them all.”
+
+“Well, I’m sure I don’t want to hear them,” said Miss Ruck.  “You have
+got a right to go to your own country; every one has a right to go to
+their own country.”
+
+“Mamma is not very patriotic,” said Aurora Church, smiling.
+
+“Well, I call that dreadful,” her companion declared.  “I have heard that
+there are some Americans like that, but I never believed it.”
+
+“There are all sorts of Americans,” I said, laughing.
+
+“Aurora’s one of the right sort,” rejoined Miss Ruck, who had apparently
+become very intimate with her new friend.
+
+“Are you very patriotic?” I asked of the young girl.
+
+“She’s right down homesick,” said Miss Sophy; “she’s dying to go.  If I
+were you my mother would have to take me.”
+
+“Mamma is going to take me to Dresden.”
+
+“Well, I declare I never heard of anything so dreadful!” cried Miss Ruck.
+“It’s like something in a story.”
+
+“I never heard there was anything very dreadful in Dresden,” I
+interposed.
+
+Miss Ruck looked at me a moment.  “Well, I don’t believe _you_ are a good
+American,” she replied, “and I never supposed you were.  You had better
+go in there and talk to Mrs. Church.”
+
+“Dresden is really very nice, isn’t it?” I asked of her companion.
+
+“It isn’t nice if you happen to prefer New York,” said Miss Sophy.  “Miss
+Church prefers New York.  Tell him you are dying to see New York; it will
+make him angry,” she went on.
+
+“I have no desire to make him angry,” said Aurora, smiling.
+
+“It is only Miss Ruck who can do that,” I rejoined.  “Have you been a
+long time in Europe?”
+
+“Always.”
+
+“I call that wicked!” Miss Sophy declared.
+
+“You might be in a worse place,” I continued.  “I find Europe very
+interesting.”
+
+Miss Ruck gave a little laugh.  “I was saying that you wanted to pass for
+a European.”
+
+“Yes, I want to pass for a Dalmatian.”
+
+Miss Ruck looked at me a moment.  “Well, you had better not come home,”
+she said.  “No one will speak to you.”
+
+“Were you born in these countries?” I asked of her companion.
+
+“Oh, no; I came to Europe when I was a small child.  But I remember
+America a little, and it seems delightful.”
+
+“Wait till you see it again.  It’s just too lovely,” said Miss Sophy.
+
+“It’s the grandest country in the world,” I added.
+
+Miss Ruck began to toss her head.  “Come away, my dear,” she said.  “If
+there’s a creature I despise it’s a man that tries to say funny things
+about his own country.”
+
+“Don’t you think one can be tired of Europe?” Aurora asked, lingering.
+
+“Possibly—after many years.”
+
+“Father was tired of it after three weeks,” said Miss Ruck.
+
+“I have been here sixteen years,” her friend went on, looking at me with
+a charming intentness, as if she had a purpose in speaking.  “It used to
+be for my education.  I don’t know what it’s for now.”
+
+“She’s beautifully educated,” said Miss Ruck.  “She knows four
+languages.”
+
+“I am not very sure that I know English.”
+
+“You should go to Boston!” cried Miss Sophy.  “They speak splendidly in
+Boston.”
+
+“C’est mon rêve,” said Aurora, still looking at me.
+
+“Have you been all over Europe,” I asked—“in all the different
+countries?”
+
+She hesitated a moment.  “Everywhere that there’s a _pension_.  Mamma is
+devoted to _pensions_.  We have lived, at one time or another, in every
+_pension_ in Europe.”
+
+“Well, I should think you had seen about enough,” said Miss Ruck.
+
+“It’s a delightful way of seeing Europe,” Aurora rejoined, with her
+brilliant smile.  “You may imagine how it has attached me to the
+different countries.  I have such charming souvenirs!  There is a
+_pension_ awaiting us now at Dresden,—eight francs a day, without wine.
+That’s rather dear.  Mamma means to make them give us wine.  Mamma is a
+great authority on _pensions_; she is known, that way, all over Europe.
+Last winter we were in Italy, and she discovered one at Piacenza,—four
+francs a day.  We made economies.”
+
+“Your mother doesn’t seem to mingle much,” observed Miss Ruck, glancing
+through the window at the scholastic attitude of Mrs. Church.
+
+“No, she doesn’t mingle, except in the native society.  Though she lives
+in _pensions_, she detests them.”
+
+“Why does she live in them, then?” asked Miss Sophy, rather resentfully.
+
+“Oh, because we are so poor; it’s the cheapest way to live.  We have
+tried having a cook, but the cook always steals.  Mamma used to set me to
+watch her; that’s the way I passed my _jeunesse_—my _belle jeunesse_.  We
+are frightfully poor,” the young girl went on, with the same strange
+frankness—a curious mixture of girlish grace and conscious cynicism.
+“Nous n’avons pas le sou.  That’s one of the reasons we don’t go back to
+America; mamma says we can’t afford to live there.”
+
+“Well, any one can see that you’re an American girl,” Miss Ruck remarked,
+in a consolatory manner.  “I can tell an American girl a mile off.
+You’ve got the American style.”
+
+“I’m afraid I haven’t the American _toilette_,” said Aurora, looking at
+the other’s superior splendour.
+
+“Well, your dress was cut in France; any one can see that.”
+
+“Yes,” said Aurora, with a laugh, “my dress was cut in France—at
+Avranches.”
+
+“Well, you’ve got a lovely figure, any way,” pursued her companion.
+
+“Ah,” said the young girl, “at Avranches, too, my figure was admired.”
+And she looked at me askance, with a certain coquetry.  But I was an
+innocent youth, and I only looked back at her, wondering.  She was a
+great deal nicer than Miss Ruck, and yet Miss Ruck would not have said
+that.  “I try to be like an American girl,” she continued; “I do my best,
+though mamma doesn’t at all encourage it.  I am very patriotic.  I try to
+copy them, though mamma has brought me up _à la française_; that is, as
+much as one can in _pensions_.  For instance, I have never been out of
+the house without mamma; oh, never, never.  But sometimes I despair;
+American girls are so wonderfully frank.  I can’t be frank, like that.  I
+am always afraid.  But I do what I can, as you see.  Excusez du peu!”
+
+I thought this young lady at least as outspoken as most of her
+unexpatriated sisters; there was something almost comical in her
+despondency.  But she had by no means caught, as it seemed to me, the
+American tone.  Whatever her tone was, however, it had a fascination;
+there was something dainty about it, and yet it was decidedly audacious.
+
+The young ladies began to stroll about the garden again, and I enjoyed
+their society until M. Pigeonneau’s festival came to an end.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+Mr. Ruck did not take his departure for Appenzell on the morrow, in spite
+of the eagerness to witness such an event which he had attributed to Mrs.
+Church.  He continued, on the contrary, for many days after, to hang
+about the garden, to wander up to the banker’s and back again, to engage
+in desultory conversation with his fellow-boarders, and to endeavour to
+assuage his constitutional restlessness by perusal of the American
+journals.  But on the morrow I had the honour of making Mrs. Church’s
+acquaintance.  She came into the salon, after the midday breakfast, with
+her German octavo under her arm, and she appealed to me for assistance in
+selecting a quiet corner.
+
+“Would you very kindly,” she said, “move that large fauteuil a little
+more this way?  Not the largest; the one with the little cushion.  The
+fauteuils here are very insufficient; I must ask Madame Beaurepas for
+another.  Thank you; a little more to the left, please; that will do.
+Are you particularly engaged?” she inquired, after she had seated
+herself.  “If not, I should like to have some conversation with you.  It
+is some time since I have met a young American of your—what shall I call
+it?—your affiliations.  I have learned your name from Madame Beaurepas; I
+think I used to know some of your people.  I don’t know what has become
+of all my friends.  I used to have a charming little circle at home, but
+now I meet no one I know.  Don’t you think there is a great difference
+between the people one meets and the people one would like to meet?
+Fortunately, sometimes,” added my interlocutress graciously, “it’s quite
+the same.  I suppose you are a specimen, a favourable specimen,” she went
+on, “of young America.  Tell me, now, what is young America thinking of
+in these days of ours?  What are its feelings, its opinions, its
+aspirations?  What is its _ideal_?”  I had seated myself near Mrs.
+Church, and she had pointed this interrogation with the gaze of her
+bright little eyes.  I felt it embarrassing to be treated as a favourable
+specimen of young America, and to be expected to answer for the great
+republic.  Observing my hesitation, Mrs. Church clasped her hands on the
+open page of her book and gave an intense, melancholy smile.  “_Has_ it
+an ideal?” she softly asked.  “Well, we must talk of this,” she went on,
+without insisting.  “Speak, for the present, for yourself simply.  Have
+you come to Europe with any special design?”
+
+“Nothing to boast of,” I said.  “I am studying a little.”
+
+“Ah, I am glad to hear that.  You are gathering up a little European
+culture; that’s what we lack, you know, at home.  No individual can do
+much, of coarse.  But you must not be discouraged; every little counts.”
+
+“I see that you, at least, are doing your part,” I rejoined gallantly,
+dropping my eyes on my companion’s learned volume.
+
+“Yes, I frankly admit that I am fond of study.  There is no one, after
+all, like the Germans.  That is, for facts.  For opinions I by no means
+always go with them.  I form my opinions myself.  I am sorry to say,
+however,” Mrs. Church continued, “that I can hardly pretend to diffuse my
+acquisitions.  I am afraid I am sadly selfish; I do little to irrigate
+the soil.  I belong—I frankly confess it—to the class of absentees.”
+
+“I had the pleasure, last evening,” I said, “of making the acquaintance
+of your daughter.  She told me you had been a long time in Europe.”
+
+Mrs. Church smiled benignantly.  “Can one ever be too long?  We shall
+never leave it.”
+
+“Your daughter won’t like that,” I said, smiling too.
+
+“Has she been taking you into her confidence?  She is a more sensible
+young lady than she sometimes appears.  I have taken great pains with
+her; she is really—I may be permitted to say it—superbly educated.”
+
+“She seemed to me a very charming girl,” I rejoined.  “And I learned that
+she speaks four languages.”
+
+“It is not only that,” said Mrs. Church, in a tone which suggested that
+this might be a very superficial species of culture.  “She has made what
+we call _de fortes études_—such as I suppose you are making now.  She is
+familiar with the results of modern science; she keeps pace with the new
+historical school.”
+
+“Ah,” said I, “she has gone much farther than I!”
+
+“You doubtless think I exaggerate, and you force me, therefore, to
+mention the fact that I am able to speak of such matters with a certain
+intelligence.”
+
+“That is very evident,” I said.  “But your daughter thinks you ought to
+take her home.”  I began to fear, as soon as I had uttered these words,
+that they savoured of treachery to the young lady, but I was reassured by
+seeing that they produced on her mother’s placid countenance no symptom
+whatever of irritation.
+
+“My daughter has her little theories,” Mrs. Church observed; “she has, I
+may say, her illusions.  And what wonder! What would youth be without its
+illusions?  Aurora has a theory that she would be happier in New York, in
+Boston, in Philadelphia, than in one of the charming old cities in which
+our lot is cast.  But she is mistaken, that is all.  We must allow our
+children their illusions, must we not?  But we must watch over them.”
+
+Although she herself seemed proof against discomposure, I found something
+vaguely irritating in her soft, sweet positiveness.
+
+“American cities,” I said, “are the paradise of young girls.”
+
+“Do you mean,” asked Mrs. Church, “that the young girls who come from
+those places are angels?”
+
+“Yes,” I said, resolutely.
+
+“This young lady—what is her odd name?—with whom my daughter has formed a
+somewhat precipitate acquaintance: is Miss Ruck an angel?  But I won’t
+force you to say anything uncivil.  It would be too cruel to make a
+single exception.”
+
+“Well,” said I, “at any rate, in America young girls have an easier lot.
+They have much more liberty.”
+
+My companion laid her hand for an instant on my arm.  “My dear young
+friend, I know America, I know the conditions of life there, so well.
+There is perhaps no subject on which I have reflected more than on our
+national idiosyncrasies.”
+
+“I am afraid you don’t approve of them,” said I, a little brutally.
+
+Brutal indeed my proposition was, and Mrs. Church was not prepared to
+assent to it in this rough shape.  She dropped her eyes on her book, with
+an air of acute meditation.  Then, raising them, “We are very crude,” she
+softly observed—“we are very crude.”  Lest even this delicately-uttered
+statement should seem to savour of the vice that she deprecated, she went
+on to explain.  “There are two classes of minds, you know—those that hold
+back, and those that push forward.  My daughter and I are not pushers; we
+move with little steps.  We like the old, trodden paths; we like the old,
+old world.”
+
+“Ah,” said I, “you know what you like; there is a great virtue in that.”
+
+“Yes, we like Europe; we prefer it.  We like the opportunities of Europe;
+we like the _rest_.  There is so much in that, you know.  The world seems
+to me to be hurrying, pressing forward so fiercely, without knowing where
+it is going.  ‘Whither?’ I often ask, in my little quiet way.  But I have
+yet to learn that any one can tell me.”
+
+“You’re a great conservative,” I observed, while I wondered whether I
+myself could answer this inquiry.
+
+Mrs. Church gave me a smile which was equivalent to a confession.  “I
+wish to retain a _little_—just a little.  Surely, we have done so much,
+we might rest a while; we might pause.  That is all my feeling—just to
+stop a little, to wait! I have seen so many changes.  I wish to draw in,
+to draw in—to hold back, to hold back.”
+
+“You shouldn’t hold your daughter back!” I answered, laughing and getting
+up.  I got up, not by way of terminating our interview, for I perceived
+Mrs. Church’s exposition of her views to be by no means complete, but in
+order to offer a chair to Miss Aurora, who at this moment drew near.  She
+thanked me and remained standing, but without at first, as I noticed,
+meeting her mother’s eye.
+
+“You have been engaged with your new acquaintance, my dear?” this lady
+inquired.
+
+“Yes, mamma, dear,” said the young girl, gently.
+
+“Do you find her very edifying?”
+
+Aurora was silent a moment; then she looked at her mother.  “I don’t
+know, mamma; she is very fresh.”
+
+I ventured to indulge in a respectful laugh.  “Your mother has another
+word for that.  But I must not,” I added, “be crude.”
+
+“Ah, vous m’en voulez?” inquired Mrs. Church.  “And yet I can’t pretend I
+said it in jest.  I feel it too much.  We have been having a little
+social discussion,” she said to her daughter.  “There is still so much to
+be said.”  “And I wish,” she continued, turning to me, “that I could give
+you our point of view.  Don’t you wish, Aurora, that we could give him
+our point of view?”
+
+“Yes, mamma,” said Aurora.
+
+“We consider ourselves very fortunate in our point of view, don’t we,
+dearest?” mamma demanded.
+
+“Very fortunate, indeed, mamma.”
+
+“You see we have acquired an insight into European life,” the elder lady
+pursued.  “We have our place at many a European fireside.  We find so
+much to esteem—so much to enjoy.  Do we not, my daughter?”
+
+“So very much, mamma,” the young girl went on, with a sort of inscrutable
+submissiveness.  I wondered at it; it offered so strange a contrast to
+the mocking freedom of her tone the night before; but while I wondered I
+was careful not to let my perplexity take precedence of my good manners.
+
+“I don’t know what you ladies may have found at European firesides,” I
+said, “but there can be very little doubt what you have left there.”
+
+Mrs. Church got up, to acknowledge my compliment.  “We have spent some
+charming hours.  And that reminds me that we have just now such an
+occasion in prospect.  We are to call upon some Genevese friends—the
+family of the Pasteur Galopin.  They are to go with us to the old library
+at the Hôtel de Ville, where there are some very interesting documents of
+the period of the Reformation; we are promised a glimpse of some
+manuscripts of poor Servetus, the antagonist and victim, you know, of
+Calvin.  Here, of course, one can only speak of Calvin under one’s
+breath, but some day, when we are more private,” and Mrs. Church looked
+round the room, “I will give you my view of him.  I think it has a touch
+of originality.  Aurora is familiar with, are you not, my daughter,
+familiar with my view of Calvin?”
+
+“Yes, mamma,” said Aurora, with docility, while the two ladies went to
+prepare for their visit to the Pasteur Galopin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+“She has demanded a new lamp; I told you she would!”  This communication
+was made me by Madame Beaurepas a couple of days later.  “And she has
+asked for a new _tapis de lit_, and she has requested me to provide
+Célestine with a pair of light shoes.  I told her that, as a general
+thing, cooks are not shod with satin.  That poor Célestine!”
+
+“Mrs. Church may be exacting,” I said, “but she is a clever little
+woman.”
+
+“A lady who pays but five francs and a half shouldn’t be too clever.
+C’est déplacé.  I don’t like the type.”
+
+“What type do you call Mrs. Church’s?”
+
+“Mon Dieu,” said Madame Beaurepas, “c’est une de ces mamans comme vous en
+avez, qui promènent leur fille.”
+
+“She is trying to marry her daughter?  I don’t think she’s of that sort.”
+
+But Madame Beaurepas shrewdly held to her idea.  “She is trying it in her
+own way; she does it very quietly.  She doesn’t want an American; she
+wants a foreigner.  And she wants a _mari sérieux_.  But she is
+travelling over Europe in search of one.  She would like a magistrate.”
+
+“A magistrate?”
+
+“A _gros bonnet_ of some kind; a professor or a deputy.”
+
+“I am very sorry for the poor girl,” I said, laughing.
+
+“You needn’t pity her too much; she’s a sly thing.”
+
+“Ah, for that, no!” I exclaimed.  “She’s a charming girl.”
+
+Madame Beaurepas gave an elderly grin.  “She has hooked you, eh?  But the
+mother won’t have you.”
+
+I developed my idea, without heeding this insinuation.  “She’s a charming
+girl, but she is a little odd.  It’s a necessity of her position.  She is
+less submissive to her mother than she has to pretend to be.  That’s in
+self-defence; it’s to make her life possible.”
+
+“She wishes to get away from her mother,” continued Madame Beaurepas.
+“She wishes to _courir les champs_.”
+
+“She wishes to go to America, her native country.”
+
+“Precisely.  And she will certainly go.”
+
+“I hope so!” I rejoined.
+
+“Some fine morning—or evening—she will go off with a young man; probably
+with a young American.”
+
+“Allons donc!” said I, with disgust.
+
+“That will be quite America enough,” pursued my cynical hostess.  “I have
+kept a boarding-house for forty years.  I have seen that type.”
+
+“Have such things as that happened _chez vous_?” I asked.
+
+“Everything has happened _chez moi_.  But nothing has happened more than
+once.  Therefore this won’t happen here.  It will be at the next place
+they go to, or the next.  Besides, here there is no young American _pour
+la partie_—none except you, Monsieur.  You are susceptible, but you are
+too reasonable.”
+
+“It’s lucky for you I am reasonable,” I answered.  “It’s thanks to that
+fact that you escape a scolding!”
+
+One morning, about this time, instead of coming back to breakfast at the
+_pension_, after my lectures at the Academy, I went to partake of this
+meal with a fellow-student, at an ancient eating-house in the collegiate
+quarter.  On separating from my friend, I took my way along that charming
+public walk known in Geneva as the Treille, a shady terrace, of immense
+elevation, overhanging a portion of the lower town.  There are spreading
+trees and well-worn benches, and over the tiles and chimneys of the
+_ville basse_ there is a view of the snow-crested Alps.  On the other
+side, as you turn your back to the view, the promenade is overlooked by a
+row of tall, sober-faced _hôtels_, the dwellings of the local
+aristocracy.  I was very fond of the place, and often resorted to it to
+stimulate my sense of the picturesque.  Presently, as I lingered there on
+this occasion, I became aware that a gentleman was seated not far from
+where I stood, with his back to the Alpine chain, which this morning was
+brilliant and distinct, and a newspaper, unfolded, in his lap.  He was
+not reading, however; he was staring before him in gloomy contemplation.
+I don’t know whether I recognised first the newspaper or its proprietor;
+one, in either case, would have helped me to identify the other.  One was
+the New _York Herald_; the other, of course, was Mr. Ruck.  As I drew
+nearer, he transferred his eyes from the stony, high-featured masks of
+the gray old houses on the other side of the terrace, and I knew by the
+expression of his face just how he had been feeling about these
+distinguished abodes.  He had made up his mind that their proprietors
+were a dusky, narrow-minded, unsociable company; plunging their roots
+into a superfluous past.  I endeavoured, therefore, as I sat down beside
+him, to suggest something more impersonal.
+
+“That’s a beautiful view of the Alps,” I observed.
+
+“Yes,” said Mr. Ruck, without moving, “I’ve examined it.  Fine thing, in
+its way—fine thing.  Beauties of nature—that sort of thing.  We came up
+on purpose to look at it.”
+
+“Your ladies, then, have been with you?”
+
+“Yes; they are just walking round.  They’re awfully restless.  They keep
+saying I’m restless, but I’m as quiet as a sleeping child to them.  It
+takes,” he added in a moment, drily, “the form of shopping.”
+
+“Are they shopping now?”
+
+“Well, if they ain’t, they’re trying to.  They told me to sit here a
+while, and they’d just walk round.  I generally know what that means.
+But that’s the principal interest for ladies,” he added, retracting his
+irony.  “We thought we’d come up here and see the cathedral; Mrs. Church
+seemed to think it a dead loss that we shouldn’t see the cathedral,
+especially as we hadn’t seen many yet.  And I had to come up to the
+banker’s any way.  Well, we certainly saw the cathedral.  I don’t know as
+we are any the better for it, and I don’t know as I should know it again.
+But we saw it, any way.  I don’t know as I should want to go there
+regularly; but I suppose it will give us, in conversation, a kind of hold
+on Mrs. Church, eh?  I guess we want something of that kind.  Well,” Mr.
+Ruck continued, “I stepped in at the banker’s to see if there wasn’t
+something, and they handed me out a Herald.”
+
+“I hope the Herald is full of good news,” I said.
+
+“Can’t say it is.  D—d bad news.”
+
+“Political,” I inquired, “or commercial?”
+
+“Oh, hang politics!  It’s business, sir.  There ain’t any business.  It’s
+all gone to,”—and Mr. Ruck became profane.  “Nine failures in one day.
+What do you say-to that?”
+
+“I hope they haven’t injured you,” I said.
+
+“Well, they haven’t helped me much.  So many houses on fire, that’s all.
+If they happen to take place in your own street, they don’t increase the
+value of your property.  When mine catches, I suppose they’ll write and
+tell me—one of these days, when they’ve got nothing else to do.  I didn’t
+get a blessed letter this morning; I suppose they think I’m having such a
+good time over here it’s a pity to disturb me.  If I could attend to
+business for about half an hour, I’d find out something.  But I can’t,
+and it’s no use talking.  The state of my health was never so
+unsatisfactory as it was about five o’clock this morning.”
+
+“I am very sorry to hear that,” I said, “and I recommend you strongly not
+to think of business.”
+
+“I don’t,” Mr. Ruck replied.  “I’m thinking of cathedrals; I’m thinking
+of the beauties of nature.  Come,” he went on, turning round on the bench
+and leaning his elbow on the parapet, “I’ll think of those mountains over
+there; they _are_ pretty, certainly.  Can’t you get over there?”
+
+“Over where?”
+
+“Over to those hills.  Don’t they run a train right up?”
+
+“You can go to Chamouni,” I said.  “You can go to Grindelwald and Zermatt
+and fifty other places.  You can’t go by rail, but you can drive.”
+
+“All right, we’ll drive—and not in a one-horse concern, either.  Yes,
+Chamouni is one of the places we put down.  I hope there are a few nice
+shops in Chamouni.”  Mr. Ruck spoke with a certain quickened emphasis,
+and in a tone more explicitly humorous than he commonly employed.  I
+thought he was excited, and yet he had not the appearance of excitement.
+He looked like a man who has simply taken, in the face of disaster, a
+sudden, somewhat imaginative, resolution not to “worry.”  He presently
+twisted himself about on his bench again and began to watch for his
+companions.  “Well, they _are_ walking round,” he resumed; “I guess
+they’ve hit on something, somewhere.  And they’ve got a carriage waiting
+outside of that archway too.  They seem to do a big business in archways
+here, don’t they.  They like to have a carriage to carry home the
+things—those ladies of mine.  Then they’re sure they’ve got them.”  The
+ladies, after this, to do them justice, were not very long in appearing.
+They came toward us, from under the archway to which Mr. Ruck had
+somewhat invidiously alluded, slowly and with a rather exhausted step and
+expression.  My companion looked at them a moment, as they advanced.
+“They’re tired,” he said softly.  “When they’re tired, like that, it’s
+very expensive.”
+
+“Well,” said Mrs. Ruck, “I’m glad you’ve had some company.”  Her husband
+looked at her, in silence, through narrowed eyelids, and I suspected that
+this gracious observation on the lady’s part was prompted by a restless
+conscience.
+
+Miss Sophy glanced at me with her little straightforward air of defiance.
+“It would have been more proper if _we_ had had the company.  Why didn’t
+you come after us, instead of sitting there?” she asked of Mr. Ruck’s
+companion.
+
+“I was told by your father,” I explained, “that you were engaged in
+sacred rites.”  Miss Ruck was not gracious, though I doubt whether it was
+because her conscience was better than her mother’s.
+
+“Well, for a gentleman there is nothing so sacred as ladies’ society,”
+replied Miss Ruck, in the manner of a person accustomed to giving neat
+retorts.
+
+“I suppose you refer to the Cathedral,” said her mother.  “Well, I must
+say, we didn’t go back there.  I don’t know what it may be of a Sunday,
+but it gave me a chill.”
+
+“We discovered the loveliest little lace-shop,” observed the young girl,
+with a serenity that was superior to bravado.
+
+Her father looked at her a while; then turned about again, leaning on the
+parapet, and gazed away at the “hills.”
+
+“Well, it was certainly cheap,” said Mrs. Ruck, also contemplating the
+Alps.
+
+“We are going to Chamouni,” said her husband.  “You haven’t any occasion
+for lace at Chamouni.”
+
+“Well, I’m glad to hear you have decided to go somewhere,” rejoined his
+wife.  “I don’t want to be a fixture at a boarding-house.”
+
+“You can wear lace anywhere,” said Miss Ruck, “if you pat it on right.
+That’s the great thing, with lace.  I don’t think they know how to wear
+lace in Europe.  I know how I mean to wear mine; but I mean to keep it
+till I get home.”
+
+Her father transferred his melancholy gaze to her elaborately-appointed
+little person; there was a great deal of very new-looking detail in Miss
+Ruck’s appearance.  Then, in a tone of voice quite out of consonance with
+his facial despondency, “Have you purchased a great deal?” he inquired.
+
+“I have purchased enough for you to make a fuss about.”
+
+“He can’t make a fuss about that,” said Mrs. Ruck.
+
+“Well, you’ll see!” declared the young girl with a little sharp laugh.
+
+But her father went on, in the same tone: “Have you got it in your
+pocket?  Why don’t you put it on—why don’t you hang it round you?”
+
+“I’ll hang it round _you_, if you don’t look out!” cried Miss Sophy.
+
+“Don’t you want to show it to this gentleman?” Mr. Ruck continued.
+
+“Mercy, how you do talk about that lace!” said his wife.
+
+“Well, I want to be lively.  There’s every reason for it; we’re going to
+Chamouni.”
+
+“You’re restless; that’s what’s the matter with you.”  And Mrs. Ruck got
+up.
+
+“No, I ain’t,” said her husband.  “I never felt so quiet; I feel as
+peaceful as a little child.”
+
+Mrs. Ruck, who had no sense whatever of humour, looked at her daughter
+and at me.  “Well, I hope you’ll improve,” she said.
+
+“Send in the bills,” Mr. Ruck went on, rising to his feet.  “Don’t
+hesitate, Sophy.  I don’t care what you do now.  In for a penny, in for a
+pound.”
+
+Miss Ruck joined her mother, with a little toss of her head, and we
+followed the ladies to the carriage.  “In your place,” said Miss Sophy to
+her father, “I wouldn’t talk so much about pennies and pounds before
+strangers.”
+
+Poor Mr. Ruck appeared to feel the force of this observation, which, in
+the consciousness of a man who had never been “mean,” could hardly fail
+to strike a responsive chord.  He coloured a little, and he was silent;
+his companions got into their vehicle, the front seat of which was
+adorned with a large parcel.  Mr. Ruck gave the parcel a little poke with
+his umbrella, and then, turning to me with a rather grimly penitential
+smile, “After all,” he said, “for the ladies that’s the principal
+interest.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+Old M. Pigeonneau had more than once proposed to me to take a walk, but I
+had hitherto been unable to respond to so alluring an invitation.  It
+befell, however, one afternoon, that I perceived him going forth upon a
+desultory stroll, with a certain lonesomeness of demeanour that attracted
+my sympathy.  I hastily overtook him, and passed my hand into his
+venerable arm, a proceeding which produced in the good old man so jovial
+a sense of comradeship that he ardently proposed we should bend our steps
+to the English Garden; no locality less festive was worthy of the
+occasion.  To the English Garden, accordingly, we went; it lay beyond the
+bridge, beside the lake.  It was very pretty and very animated; there was
+a band playing in the middle, and a considerable number of persons
+sitting under the small trees, on benches and little chairs, or strolling
+beside the blue water.  We joined the strollers, we observed our
+companions, and conversed on obvious topics.  Some of these last, of
+course, were the pretty women who embellished the scene, and who, in the
+light of M. Pigeonneau’s comprehensive criticism, appeared surprisingly
+numerous.  He seemed bent upon our making up our minds as to which was
+the prettiest, and as this was an innocent game I consented to play at
+it.
+
+Suddenly M. Pigeonneau stopped, pressing my arm with the liveliest
+emotion.  “La voilà, la voilà, the prettiest!” he quickly murmured,
+“coming toward us, in a blue dress, with the other.”  It was at the other
+I was looking, for the other, to my surprise, was our interesting
+fellow-pensioner, the daughter of a vigilant mother.  M. Pigeonneau,
+meanwhile, had redoubled his exclamations; he had recognised Miss Sophy
+Ruck.  “Oh, la belle rencontre, nos aimables convives; the prettiest girl
+in the world, in effect!”
+
+We immediately greeted and joined the young ladies, who, like ourselves,
+were walking arm in arm and enjoying the scene.
+
+“I was citing you with admiration to my friend even before I had
+recognised you,” said M. Pigeonneau to Miss Ruck.
+
+“I don’t believe in French compliments,” remarked this young lady,
+presenting her back to the smiling old man.
+
+“Are you and Miss Ruck walking alone?” I asked of her companion.  “You
+had better accept of M. Pigeonneau’s gallant protection, and of mine.”
+
+Aurora Church had taken her hand out of Miss Ruck’s arm; she looked at
+me, smiling, with her head a little inclined, while, upon her shoulder,
+she made her open parasol revolve.  “Which is most improper—to walk alone
+or to walk with gentlemen?  I wish to do what is most improper.”
+
+“What mysterious logic governs your conduct?” I inquired.
+
+“He thinks you can’t understand him when he talks like that,” said Miss
+Ruck.  “But I do understand you, always!”
+
+“So I have always ventured to hope, my dear Miss Ruck.”
+
+“Well, if I didn’t, it wouldn’t be much loss,” rejoined this young lady.
+
+“Allons, en marche!” cried M. Pigeonneau, smiling still, and
+undiscouraged by her inhumanity.  “Let as make together the tour of the
+garden.”  And he imposed his society upon Miss Ruck with a respectful,
+elderly grace which was evidently unable to see anything in her
+reluctance but modesty, and was sublimely conscious of a mission to place
+modesty at its ease.  This ill-assorted couple walked in front, while
+Aurora Church and I strolled along together.
+
+“I am sure this is more improper,” said my companion; “this is
+delightfully improper.  I don’t say that as a compliment to you,” she
+added.  “I would say it to any man, no matter how stupid.”
+
+“Oh, I am very stupid,” I answered, “but this doesn’t seem to me wrong.”
+
+“Not for you, no; only for me.  There is nothing that a man can do that
+is wrong, is there?  _En morale_, you know, I mean.  Ah, yes, he can
+steal; but I think there is nothing else, is there?”
+
+“I don’t know.  One doesn’t know those things until after one has done
+them.  Then one is enlightened.”
+
+“And you mean that you have never been enlightened?  You make yourself
+out very good.”
+
+“That is better than making one’s self out bad, as you do.”
+
+The young girl glanced at me a moment, and then, with her charming smile,
+“That’s one of the consequences of a false position.”
+
+“Is your position false?” I inquired, smiling too at this large formula.
+
+“Distinctly so.”
+
+“In what way?”
+
+“Oh, in every way.  For instance, I have to pretend to be a _jeune
+fille_.  I am not a jeune fille; no American girl is a jeune fille; an
+American girl is an intelligent, responsible creature.  I have to pretend
+to be very innocent, but I am not very innocent.”
+
+“You don’t pretend to be very innocent; you pretend to be—what shall I
+call it?—very wise.”
+
+“That’s no pretence.  I am wise.”
+
+“You are not an American girl,” I ventured to observe.
+
+My companion almost stopped, looking at me; there was a little flush in
+her cheek.  “Voilà!” she said.  “There’s my false position.  I want to be
+an American girl, and I’m not.”
+
+“Do you want me to tell you?” I went on.  “An American girl wouldn’t talk
+as you are talking now.”
+
+“Please tell me,” said Aurora Church, with expressive eagerness.  “How
+would she talk?”
+
+“I can’t tell you all the things an American girl would say, but I think
+I can tell you the things she wouldn’t say.  She wouldn’t reason out her
+conduct, as you seem to me to do.”
+
+Aurora gave me the most flattering attention.  “I see.  She would be
+simpler.  To do very simple things that are not at all simple—that is the
+American girl!”
+
+I permitted myself a small explosion of hilarity.  “I don’t know whether
+you are a French girl, or what you are,” I said, “but you are very
+witty.”
+
+“Ah, you mean that I strike false notes!” cried Aurora Church, sadly.
+“That’s just what I want to avoid.  I wish you would always tell me.”
+
+The conversational union between Miss Ruck and her neighbour, in front of
+us, had evidently not become a close one.  The young lady suddenly turned
+round to us with a question: “Don’t you want some ice-cream?”
+
+“_She_ doesn’t strike false notes,” I murmured.
+
+There was a kind of pavilion or kiosk, which served as a café, and at
+which the delicacies procurable at such an establishment were dispensed.
+Miss Ruck pointed to the little green tables and chairs which were set
+out on the gravel; M. Pigeonneau, fluttering with a sense of dissipation,
+seconded the proposal, and we presently sat down and gave our order to a
+nimble attendant.  I managed again to place myself next to Aurora Church;
+our companions were on the other side of the table.
+
+My neighbour was delighted with our situation.  “This is best of all,”
+she said.  “I never believed I should come to a café with two strange
+men! Now, you can’t persuade me this isn’t wrong.”
+
+“To make it wrong we ought to see your mother coming down that path.”
+
+“Ah, my mother makes everything wrong,” said the young girl, attacking
+with a little spoon in the shape of a spade the apex of a pink ice.  And
+then she returned to her idea of a moment before: “You must promise to
+tell me—to warn me in some way—whenever I strike a false note.  You must
+give a little cough, like that—ahem!”
+
+“You will keep me very busy, and people will think I am in a
+consumption.”
+
+“_Voyons_,” she continued, “why have you never talked to me more?  Is
+that a false note?  Why haven’t you been ‘attentive?’  That’s what
+American girls call it; that’s what Miss Ruck calls it.”
+
+I assured myself that our companions were out of earshot, and that Miss
+Ruck was much occupied with a large vanilla cream.  “Because you are
+always entwined with that young lady.  There is no getting near you.”
+
+Aurora looked at her friend while the latter devoted herself to her ice.
+“You wonder why I like her so much, I suppose.  So does mamma; elle s’y
+perd.  I don’t like her particularly; je n’en suis pas folle.  But she
+gives me information; she tells me about America.  Mamma has always tried
+to prevent my knowing anything about it, and I am all the more curious.
+And then Miss Ruck is very fresh.”
+
+“I may not be so fresh as Miss Ruck,” I said, “but in future, when you
+want information, I recommend you to come to me for it.”
+
+“Our friend offers to take me to America; she invites me to go back with
+her, to stay with her.  You couldn’t do that, could you?” And the young
+girl looked at me a moment.  “_Bon_, a false note I can see it by your
+face; you remind me of a _maître de piano_.”
+
+“You overdo the character—the poor American girl,” I said.  “Are you
+going to stay with that delightful family?”
+
+“I will go and stay with any one that will take me or ask me.  It’s a
+real _nostalgie_.  She says that in New York—in Thirty-Seventh Street—I
+should have the most lovely time.”
+
+“I have no doubt you would enjoy it.”
+
+“Absolute liberty to begin with.”
+
+“It seems to me you have a certain liberty here,” I rejoined.
+
+“Ah, _this_?  Oh, I shall pay for this.  I shall be punished by mamma,
+and I shall be lectured by Madame Galopin.”
+
+“The wife of the pasteur?”
+
+“His _digne épouse_.  Madame Galopin, for mamma, is the incarnation of
+European opinion.  That’s what vexes me with mamma, her thinking so much
+of people like Madame Galopin.  Going to see Madame Galopin—mamma calls
+that being in European society.  European society!  I’m so sick of that
+expression; I have heard it since I was six years old.  Who is Madame
+Galopin—who thinks anything of her here?  She is nobody; she is perfectly
+third-rate.  If I like America better than mamma, I also know Europe
+better.”
+
+“But your mother, certainly,” I objected, a trifle timidly, for my young
+lady was excited, and had a charming little passion in her eye—“your
+mother has a great many social relations all over the Continent.”
+
+“She thinks so, but half the people don’t care for us.  They are not so
+good as we, and they know it—I’ll do them that justice—and they wonder
+why we should care for them.  When we are polite to them, they think the
+less of us; there are plenty of people like that.  Mamma thinks so much
+of them simply because they are foreigners.  If I could tell you all the
+dull, stupid, second-rate people I have had to talk to, for no better
+reason than that they were _de leur pays_!—Germans, French, Italians,
+Turks, everything.  When I complain, mamma always says that at any rate
+it’s practice in the language.  And she makes so much of the English,
+too; I don’t know what that’s practice in.”
+
+Before I had time to suggest an hypothesis, as regards this latter point,
+I saw something that made me rise, with a certain solemnity, from my
+chair.  This was nothing less than the neat little figure of Mrs.
+Church—a perfect model of the _femme comme il faut_—approaching our table
+with an impatient step, and followed most unexpectedly in her advance by
+the pre-eminent form of Mr. Ruck.  She had evidently come in quest of her
+daughter, and if she had commanded this gentleman’s attendance, it had
+been on no softer ground than that of his unenvied paternity to her
+guilty child’s accomplice.  My movement had given the alarm, and Aurora
+Church and M. Pigeonneau got up; Miss Ruck alone did not, in the local
+phrase, derange herself.  Mrs. Church, beneath her modest little bonnet,
+looked very serious, but not at all fluttered; she came straight to her
+daughter, who received her with a smile, and then she looked all round at
+the rest of us, very fixedly and tranquilly, without bowing.  I must do
+both these ladies the justice to mention that neither of them made the
+least little “scene.”
+
+“I have come for you, dearest,” said the mother.
+
+“Yes, dear mamma.”
+
+“Come for you—come for you,” Mrs. Church repeated, looking down at the
+relics of our little feast.  “I was obliged to ask Mr. Ruck’s assistance.
+I was puzzled; I thought a long time.”
+
+“Well, Mrs. Church, I was glad to see you puzzled once in your life!”
+said Mr. Ruck, with friendly jocosity.  “But you came pretty straight for
+all that.  I had hard work to keep up with you.”
+
+“We will take a cab, Aurora,” Mrs. Church went on, without heeding this
+pleasantry—“a closed one.  Come, my daughter.”
+
+“Yes, dear mamma.”  The young girl was blushing, yet she was still
+smiling; she looked round at us all, and, as her eyes met mine, I thought
+she was beautiful.  “Good-bye,” she said to us.  “I have had a _lovely
+time_.”
+
+“We must not linger,” said her mother; “it is five o’clock.  We are to
+dine, you know, with Madame Galopin.”
+
+“I had quite forgotten,” Aurora declared.  “That will be charming.”
+
+“Do you want me to assist you to carry her back, ma am?” asked Mr. Ruck.
+
+Mrs. Church hesitated a moment, with her serene little gaze.  “Do you
+prefer, then, to leave your daughter to finish the evening with these
+gentlemen?”
+
+Mr. Ruck pushed back his hat and scratched the top of his head.  “Well, I
+don’t know.  How would you like that, Sophy?”
+
+“Well, I never!” exclaimed Sophy, as Mrs. Church marched off with her
+daughter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+I had half expected that Mrs. Church would make me feel the weight of her
+disapproval of my own share in that little act of revelry in the English
+Garden.  But she maintained her claim to being a highly reasonable
+woman—I could not but admire the justice of this pretension—by
+recognising my irresponsibility.  I had taken her daughter as I found
+her, which was, according to Mrs. Church’s view, in a very equivocal
+position.  The natural instinct of a young man, in such a situation, is
+not to protest but to profit; and it was clear to Mrs. Church that I had
+had nothing to do with Miss Aurora’s appearing in public under the
+insufficient chaperonage of Miss Ruck.  Besides, she liked to converse,
+and she apparently did me the honour to believe that of all the members
+of the Pension Beaurepas I had the most cultivated understanding.  I
+found her in the salon a couple of evenings after the incident I have
+just narrated, and I approached her with a view of making my peace with
+her, if this should prove necessary.  But Mrs. Church was as gracious as
+I could have desired; she put her marker into her book, and folded her
+plump little hands on the cover.  She made no specific allusion to the
+English Garden; she embarked, rather, upon those general considerations
+in which her refined intellect was so much at home.
+
+“Always at your studies, Mrs. Church,” I ventured to observe.
+
+“Que voulez-vous?  To say studies is to say too much; one doesn’t study
+in the parlour of a boarding-house.  But I do what I can; I have always
+done what I can.  That is all I have ever claimed.”
+
+“No one can do more, and you seem to have done a great deal.”
+
+“Do you know my secret?” she asked, with an air of brightening
+confidence.  And she paused a moment before she imparted her secret—“To
+care only for the _best_!  To do the best, to know the best—to have, to
+desire, to recognise, only the best.  That’s what I have always done, in
+my quiet little way.  I have gone through Europe on my devoted little
+errand, seeking, seeing, heeding, only the best.  And it has not been for
+myself alone; it has been for my daughter.  My daughter has had the best.
+We are not rich, but I can say that.”
+
+“She has had you, madam,” I rejoined finely.
+
+“Certainly, such as I am, I have been devoted.  We have got something
+everywhere; a little here, a little there.  That’s the real secret—to get
+something everywhere; you always can if you are devoted.  Sometimes it
+has been a little music, sometimes a little deeper insight into the
+history of art; every little counts you know.  Sometimes it has been just
+a glimpse, a view, a lovely landscape, an impression.  We have always
+been on the look-out.  Sometimes it has been a valued friendship, a
+delightful social tie.”
+
+“Here comes the ‘European society,’ the poor daughter’s bugbear,” I said
+to myself.  “Certainly,” I remarked aloud—I admit, rather perversely—“if
+you have lived a great deal in pensions, you must have got acquainted
+with lots of people.”
+
+Mrs. Church dropped her eyes a moment; and then, with considerable
+gravity, “I think the European pension system in many respects
+remarkable, and in some satisfactory.  But of the friendships that we
+have formed, few have been contracted in establishments of this kind.”
+
+“I am sorry to hear that!” I said, laughing.
+
+“I don’t say it for you, though I might say it for some others.  We have
+been interested in European homes.”
+
+“Oh, I see!”
+
+“We have the _éntree_ of the old Genevese society I like its tone.  I
+prefer it to that of Mr. Ruck,” added Mrs. Church, calmly; “to that of
+Mrs. Ruck and Miss Ruck—of Miss Ruck especially.”
+
+“Ah, the poor Rucks haven’t any tone at all,” I said “Don’t take them
+more seriously than they take themselves.”
+
+“Tell me this,” my companion rejoined, “are they fair examples?”
+
+“Examples of what?”
+
+“Of our American tendencies.”
+
+“‘Tendencies’ is a big word, dear lady; tendencies are difficult to
+calculate.  And you shouldn’t abuse those good Rucks, who have been very
+kind to your daughter.  They have invited her to go and stay with them in
+Thirty-Seventh Street.”
+
+“Aurora has told me.  It might be very serious.”
+
+“It might be very droll,” I said.
+
+“To me,” declared Mrs. Church, “it is simply terrible.  I think we shall
+have to leave the Pension Beaurepas.  I shall go back to Madame
+Chamousset.”
+
+“On account of the Rucks?” I asked.
+
+“Pray, why don’t they go themselves?  I have given them some excellent
+addresses—written down the very hours of the trains.  They were going to
+Appenzell; I thought it was arranged.”
+
+“They talk of Chamouni now,” I said; “but they are very helpless and
+undecided.”
+
+“I will give them some Chamouni addresses.  Mrs. Ruck will send a _chaise
+à porteurs_; I will give her the name of a man who lets them lower than
+you get them at the hotels.  After that they _must_ go.”
+
+“Well, I doubt,” I observed, “whether Mr. Ruck will ever really be seen
+on the Mer de Glace—in a high hat.  He’s not like you; he doesn’t value
+his European privileges.  He takes no interest.  He regrets Wall Street,
+acutely.  As his wife says, he is very restless, but he has no curiosity
+about Chamouni.  So you must not depend too much on the effect of your
+addresses.”
+
+“Is it a frequent type?” asked Mrs. Church, with an air of self-control.
+
+“I am afraid so.  Mr. Ruck is a broken-down man of business.  He is
+broken down in health, and I suspect he is broken down in fortune.  He
+has spent his whole life in buying and selling; he knows how to do
+nothing else.  His wife and daughter have spent their lives, not in
+selling, but in buying; and they, on their side, know how to do nothing
+else.  To get something in a shop that they can put on their backs—that
+is their one idea; they haven’t another in their heads.  Of course they
+spend no end of money, and they do it with an implacable persistence,
+with a mixture of audacity and of cunning.  They do it in his teeth and
+they do it behind his back; the mother protects the daughter, and the
+daughter eggs on the mother.  Between them they are bleeding him to
+death.”
+
+“Ah, what a picture!” murmured Mrs. Church.  “I am afraid they are
+very-uncultivated.”
+
+“I share your fears.  They are perfectly ignorant; they have no
+resources.  The vision of fine clothes occupies their whole imagination.
+They have not an idea—even a worse one—to compete with it.  Poor Mr.
+Ruck, who is extremely good-natured and soft, seems to me a really tragic
+figure.  He is getting bad news every day from home; his business is
+going to the dogs.  He is unable to stop it; he has to stand and watch
+his fortunes ebb.  He has been used to doing things in a big way, and he
+feels mean, if he makes a fuss about bills.  So the ladies keep sending
+them in.”
+
+“But haven’t they common sense?  Don’t they know they are ruining
+themselves?”
+
+“They don’t believe it.  The duty of an American husband and father is to
+keep them going.  If he asks them how, that’s his own affair.  So, by way
+of not being mean, of being a good American husband and father, poor Ruck
+stands staring at bankruptcy.”
+
+Mrs. Church looked at me a moment, in quickened meditation.  “Why, if
+Aurora were to go to stay with them, she might not even be properly fed!”
+
+“I don’t, on the whole, recommend,” I said, laughing, “that your daughter
+should pay a visit to Thirty-Seventh Street.”
+
+“Why should I be subjected to such trials—so sadly _éprouvée_?  Why
+should a daughter of mine like that dreadful girl?”
+
+“_Does_ she like her?”
+
+“Pray, do you mean,” asked my companion, softly, “that Aurora is a
+hypocrite?”
+
+I hesitated a moment.  “A little, since you ask me.  I think you have
+forced her to be.”
+
+Mrs. Church answered this possibly presumptuous charge with a tranquil,
+candid exultation.  “I never force my daughter!”
+
+“She is nevertheless in a false position,” I rejoined.  “She hungers and
+thirsts to go back to her own country; she wants ‘to come’ out in New
+York, which is certainly, socially speaking, the El Dorado of young
+ladies.  She likes any one, for the moment, who will talk to her of that,
+and serve as a connecting-link with her native shores.  Miss Ruck
+performs this agreeable office.”
+
+“Your idea is, then, that if she were to go with Miss Ruck to America she
+would drop her afterwards.”
+
+I complimented Mrs. Church upon her logical mind, but I repudiated this
+cynical supposition.  “I can’t imagine her—when it should come to the
+point—embarking with the famille Ruck.  But I wish she might go,
+nevertheless.”
+
+Mrs. Church shook her head serenely, and smiled at my inappropriate zeal.
+“I trust my poor child may never be guilty of so fatal a mistake.  She is
+completely in error; she is wholly unadapted to the peculiar conditions
+of American life.  It would not please her.  She would not sympathise.
+My daughter’s ideal is not the ideal of the class of young women to which
+Miss Ruck belongs.  I fear they are very numerous; they give the
+tone—they give the tone.”
+
+“It is you that are mistaken,” I said; “go home for six months and see.”
+
+“I have not, unfortunately, the means to make costly experiments.  My
+daughter has had great advantages—rare advantages—and I should be very
+sorry to believe that _au fond_ she does not appreciate them.  One thing
+is certain: I must remove her from this pernicious influence.  We must
+part company with this deplorable family.  If Mr. Ruck and his ladies
+cannot be induced to go to Chamouni—a journey that no traveller with the
+smallest self-respect would omit—my daughter and I shall be obliged to
+retire.  We shall go to Dresden.”
+
+“To Dresden?”
+
+“The capital of Saxony.  I had arranged to go there for the autumn, but
+it will be simpler to go immediately.  There are several works in the
+gallery with which my daughter has not, I think, sufficiently
+familiarised herself; it is especially strong in the seventeenth century
+schools.”
+
+As my companion offered me this information I perceived Mr. Ruck come
+lounging in, with his hands in his pockets, and his elbows making acute
+angles.  He had his usual anomalous appearance of both seeking and
+avoiding society, and he wandered obliquely toward Mrs. Church, whose
+last words he had overheard.  “The seventeenth century schools,” he said,
+slowly, as if he were weighing some very small object in a very
+large-pair of scales.  “Now, do you suppose they _had_ schools at that
+period?”
+
+Mrs. Church rose with a good deal of precision, making no answer to this
+incongruous jest.  She clasped her large volume to her neat little bosom,
+and she fixed a gentle, serious eye upon Mr. Ruck.
+
+“I had a letter this morning from Chamouni,” she said.
+
+“Well,” replied Mr. Ruck, “I suppose you’ve got friends all over.”
+
+“I have friends at Chamouni, but they are leaving.  To their great
+regret.”  I had got up, too; I listened to this statement, and I
+wondered.  I am almost ashamed to mention the subject of my agitation.  I
+asked myself whether this was a sudden improvisation, consecrated by
+maternal devotion; but this point has never been elucidated.  “They are
+giving up some charming rooms; perhaps you would like them.  I would
+suggest your telegraphing.  The weather is glorious,” continued Mrs.
+Church, “and the highest peaks are now perceived with extraordinary
+distinctness.”
+
+Mr. Ruck listened, as he always listened, respectfully.  “Well,” he said,
+“I don’t know as I want to go up Mount Blank.  That’s the principal
+attraction, isn’t it?”
+
+“There are many others.  I thought I would offer you an—an exceptional
+opportunity.”
+
+“Well,” said Mr. Ruck, “you’re right down friendly.  But I seem to have
+more opportunities than I know what to do with.  I don’t seem able to
+take hold.”
+
+“It only needs a little decision,” remarked Mrs. Church, with an air
+which was an admirable example of this virtue.  “I wish you good-night,
+sir.”  And she moved noiselessly away.
+
+Mr. Ruck, with his long legs apart, stood staring after her; then he
+transferred his perfectly quiet eyes to me.  “Does she own a hotel over
+there?” he asked.  “Has she got any stock in Mount Blank?”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+The next day Madame Beaurepas handed me, with her own elderly fingers, a
+missive, which proved to be a telegram.  After glancing at it, I informed
+her that it was apparently a signal for my departure; my brother had
+arrived in England, and proposed to me to meet him there; he had come on
+business, and was to spend but three weeks in Europe.  “But my house
+empties itself!” cried the old woman.  “The famille Ruck talks of leaving
+me, and Madame Church _nous fait la révérence_.”
+
+“Mrs. Church is going away?”
+
+“She is packing her trunk; she is a very extraordinary person.  Do you
+know what she asked me this morning?  To invent some combination by which
+the famille Ruck should move away.  I informed her that I was not an
+inventor.  That poor famille Ruck!  ‘Oblige me by getting rid of them,’
+said Madame Church, as she would have asked Célestine to remove a dish of
+cabbage.  She speaks as if the world were made for Madame Church.  I
+intimated to her that if she objected to the company there was a very
+simple remedy; and at present _elle fait ses paquets_.”
+
+“She really asked you to get the Rucks out of the house?”
+
+“She asked me to tell them that their rooms had been let, three months
+ago, to another family.  She has an _aplomb_!”
+
+Mrs. Church’s aplomb caused me considerable diversion; I am not sure that
+it was not, in some degree, to laugh over it at my leisure that I went
+out into the garden that evening to smoke a cigar.  The night was dark
+and not particularly balmy, and most of my fellow-pensioners, after
+dinner, had remained in-doors.  A long straight walk conducted from the
+door of the house to the ancient grille that I have described, and I
+stood here for some time, looking through the iron bars at the silent
+empty street.  The prospect was not entertaining, and I presently turned
+away.  At this moment I saw, in the distance, the door of the house open
+and throw a shaft of lamplight into the darkness.  Into the lamplight
+there stepped the figure of a female, who presently closed the door
+behind her.  She disappeared in the dusk of the garden, and I had seen
+her but for an instant, but I remained under the impression that Aurora
+Church, on the eve of her departure, had come out for a meditative
+stroll.
+
+I lingered near the gate, keeping the red tip of my cigar turned toward
+the house, and before long a young lady emerged from among the shadows of
+the trees and encountered the light of a lamp that stood just outside the
+gate.  It was in fact Aurora Church, but she seemed more bent upon
+conversation than upon meditation.  She stood a moment looking at me, and
+then she said,—
+
+“Ought I to retire—to return to the house?”
+
+“If you ought, I should be very sorry to tell you so,” I answered.
+
+“But we are all alone; there is no one else in the garden.”
+
+“It is not the first time that I have been alone with a young lady.  I am
+not at all terrified.”
+
+“Ah, but I?” said the young girl.  “I have never been alone—” then,
+quickly, she interrupted herself.  “Good, there’s another false note!”
+
+“Yes, I am obliged to admit that one is very false.”
+
+She stood looking at me.  “I am going away to-morrow; after that there
+will be no one to tell me.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+“That will matter little,” I presently replied.  “Telling you will do no
+good.”
+
+“Ah, why do you say that?” murmured Aurora Church.
+
+I said it partly because it was true; but I said it for other reasons as
+well, which it was hard to define.  Standing there bare-headed, in the
+night air, in the vague light, this young lady looked extremely
+interesting; and the interest of her appearance was not diminished by a
+suspicion on my own part that she had come into the garden knowing me to
+be there.  I thought her a charming girl, and I felt very sorry for her;
+but, as I looked at her, the terms in which Madame Beaurepas had ventured
+to characterise her recurred to me with a certain force.  I had professed
+a contempt for them at the time, but it now came into my head that
+perhaps this unfortunately situated, this insidiously mutinous young
+creature, was looking out for a preserver.  She was certainly not a girl
+to throw herself at a man’s head, but it was possible that in her
+intense—her almost morbid-desire to put into effect an ideal which was
+perhaps after all charged with as many fallacies as her mother affirmed,
+she might do something reckless and irregular—something in which a
+sympathetic compatriot, as yet unknown, would find his profit.  The
+image, unshaped though it was, of this sympathetic compatriot, filled me
+with a sort of envy.  For some moments I was silent, conscious of these
+things, and then I answered her question.  “Because some things—some
+differences are felt, not learned.  To you liberty is not natural; you
+are like a person who has bought a repeater, and, in his satisfaction, is
+constantly making it sound.  To a real American girl her liberty is a
+very vulgarly-ticking old clock.”
+
+“Ah, you mean, then,” said the poor girl, “that my mother has ruined me?”
+
+“Ruined you?”
+
+“She has so perverted my mind, that when I try to be natural I am
+necessarily immodest.”
+
+“That again is a false note,” I said, laughing.
+
+She turned away.  “I think you are cruel.”
+
+“By no means,” I declared; “because, for my own taste, I prefer you
+as—as—”
+
+I hesitated, and she turned back.  “As what?”
+
+“As you are.”
+
+She looked at me a while again, and then she said, in a little reasoning
+voice that reminded me of her mother’s, only that it was conscious and
+studied, “I was not aware that I am under any particular obligation to
+please you!”  And then she gave a clear laugh, quite at variance with her
+voice.
+
+“Oh, there is no obligation,” I said, “but one has preferences.  I am
+very sorry you are going away.”
+
+“What does it matter to you?  You are going yourself.”
+
+“As I am going in a different direction that makes all the greater
+separation.”
+
+She answered nothing; she stood looking through the bars of the tall gate
+at the empty, dusky street.  “This grille is like a cage,” she said, at
+last.
+
+“Fortunately, it is a cage that will open.”  And I laid my hand on the
+lock.
+
+“Don’t open it,” and she pressed the gate back.  “If you should open it I
+would go out—and never return.”
+
+“Where should you go?”
+
+“To America.”
+
+“Straight away?”
+
+“Somehow or other.  I would go to the American consul.  I would beg him
+to give me money—to help me.”
+
+I received this assertion without a smile; I was not in a smiling humour.
+On the contrary, I felt singularly excited, and I kept my hand on the
+lock of the gate.  I believed (or I thought I believed) what my companion
+said, and I had—absurd as it may appear—an irritated vision of her
+throwing herself upon consular sympathy.  It seemed to me, for a moment,
+that to pass out of that gate with this yearning, straining, young
+creature, would be to pass into some mysterious felicity.  If I were only
+a hero of romance, I would offer, myself, to take her to America.
+
+In a moment more, perhaps, I should have persuaded myself that I was one,
+but at this juncture I heard a sound that was not romantic.  It proved to
+be the very realistic tread of Célestine, the cook, who stood grinning at
+us as we turned about from our colloquy.
+
+“I ask _bien pardon_,” said Célestine.  “The mother of Mademoiselle
+desires that Mademoiselle should come in immediately.  M. le Pasteur
+Galopin has come to make his adieux to _ces dames_.”
+
+Aurora gave me only one glance, but it was a touching one.  Then she
+slowly departed with Célestine.
+
+The next morning, on coming into the garden, I found that Mrs. Church and
+her daughter had departed.  I was informed of this fact by old M.
+Pigeonneau, who sat there under a tree, having his coffee at a little
+green table.
+
+“I have nothing to envy you,” he said; “I had the last glimpse of that
+charming Miss Aurora.”
+
+“I had a very late glimpse,” I answered, “and it was all I could possibly
+desire.”
+
+“I have always noticed,” rejoined M. Pigeonneau, “That your desires are
+more moderate than mine.  Que voulez-vous?  I am of the old school.  Je
+crois que la race se perd.  I regret the departure of that young girl:
+she had an enchanting smile.  Ce sera une femme d’esprit.  For the
+mother, I can console myself.  I am not sure that _she_ was a femme
+d’esprit, though she wished to pass for one.  Round, rosy, _potelée_, she
+yet had not the temperament of her appearance; she was a _femme austère_.
+I have often noticed that contradiction in American ladies.  You see a
+plump little woman, with a speaking eye, and the contour and complexion
+of a ripe peach, and if you venture to conduct yourself in the smallest
+degree in accordance with these _indices_, you discover a species of
+Methodist—of what do you call it?—of Quakeress.  On the other hand, you
+encounter a tall, lean, angular person, without colour, without grace,
+all elbows and knees, and you find it’s a nature of the tropics! The
+women of duty look like coquettes, and the others look like alpenstocks!
+However, we have still the handsome Madame Ruck—a real _femme de Rubens_,
+_celle-là_.  It is very true that to talk to her one must know the
+Flemish tongue!”
+
+I had determined, in accordance with my brother’s telegram, to go away in
+the afternoon; so that, having various duties to perform, I left M.
+Pigeonneau to his international comparisons.  Among other things, I went
+in the course of the morning to the banker’s, to draw money for my
+journey, and there I found Mr. Ruck, with a pile of crumpled letters in
+his lap, his chair tipped back, and his eyes gloomily fixed on the fringe
+of the green plush table-cloth.  I timidly expressed the hope that he had
+got better news from home; whereupon he gave me a look in which,
+considering his provocation, the absence of irritation was conspicuous.
+
+He took up his letters in his large hand, and crushing them together,
+held it out to me.  “That epistolary matter,” he said, “is worth about
+five cents.  But I guess,” he added, rising, “I have taken it in by this
+time.”  When I had drawn my money I asked him to come and breakfast with
+me at the little _brasserie_, much favoured by students, to which I used
+to resort in the old town.  “I couldn’t eat, sir,” he said, “I—couldn’t
+eat.  Bad news takes away the appetite.  But I guess I’ll go with you, so
+that I needn’t go to table down there at the pension.  The old woman down
+there is always accusing me of turning up my nose at her food.  Well, I
+guess I shan’t turn up my nose at anything now.”
+
+We went to the little brasserie, where poor Mr. Ruck made the lightest
+possible breakfast.  But if he ate very little, he talked a great deal;
+he talked about business, going into a hundred details in which I was
+quite unable to follow him.  His talk was not angry nor bitter; it was a
+long, meditative, melancholy monologue; if it had been a trifle less
+incoherent I should almost have called it philosophic.  I was very sorry
+for him; I wanted to do something for him, but the only thing I could do
+was, when we had breakfasted, to see him safely back to the Pension
+Beaurepas.  We went across the Treille and down the Corraterie, out of
+which we turned into the Rue du Rhône.  In this latter street, as all the
+world knows, are many of those brilliant jewellers’ shops for which
+Geneva is famous.  I always admired their glittering windows, and never
+passed them without a lingering glance.  Even on this occasion,
+pre-occupied as I was with my impending departure, and with my
+companion’s troubles, I suffered my eyes to wander along the precious
+tiers that flashed and twinkled behind the huge clear plates of glass.
+Thanks to this inveterate habit, I made a discovery.  In the largest and
+most brilliant of these establishments I perceived two ladies, seated
+before the counter with an air of absorption, which sufficiently
+proclaimed their identity.  I hoped my companion would not see them, but
+as we came abreast of the door, a little beyond, we found it open to the
+warm summer air.  Mr. Ruck happened to glance in, and he immediately
+recognised his wife and daughter.  He slowly stopped, looking at them; I
+wondered what he would do.  The salesman was holding up a bracelet before
+them, on its velvet cushion, and flashing it about in an irresistible
+manner.
+
+Mr. Ruck said nothing, but he presently went in, and I did the same.
+
+“It will be an opportunity,” I remarked, as cheerfully as possible, “for
+me to bid good-bye to the ladies.”
+
+They turned round when Mr. Ruck came in, and looked at him without
+confusion.  “Well, you had better go home to breakfast,” remarked his
+wife.  Miss Sophy made no remark, but she took the bracelet from the
+attendant and gazed at it very fixedly.  Mr. Ruck seated himself on an
+empty stool and looked round the shop.
+
+“Well, you have been here before,” said his wife; “you were here the
+first day we came.”
+
+Miss Ruck extended the precious object in her hands towards me.  “Don’t
+you think that sweet?” she inquired.
+
+I looked at it a moment.  “No, I think it’s ugly.”
+
+She glanced at me a moment, incredulous.  “Well, I don’t believe you have
+any taste.”
+
+“Why, sir, it’s just lovely,” said Mrs. Ruck.
+
+“You’ll see it some day on me, any way,” her daughter declared.
+
+“No, he won’t,” said Mr. Ruck, quietly.
+
+“It will be his own fault, then,” Miss Sophy observed.
+
+“Well, if we are going to Chamouni we want to get something here,” said
+Mrs. Ruck.  “We may not have another chance.”
+
+Mr. Ruck was still looking round the shop, whistling in a very low tone.
+“We ain’t going to Chamouni.  We are going to New York city, straight.”
+
+“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” said Mrs. Ruck.  “Don’t you suppose we
+want to take something home?”
+
+“If we are going straight back I must have that bracelet,” her daughter
+declared, “Only I don’t want a velvet case; I want a satin case.”
+
+“I must bid you good-bye,” I said to the ladies.  “I am leaving Geneva in
+an hour or two.”
+
+“Take a good look at that bracelet, so you’ll know it when you see it,”
+said Miss Sophy.
+
+“She’s bound to have something,” remarked her mother, almost proudly.
+
+Mr. Ruck was still vaguely inspecting the shop; he was still whistling a
+little.  “I am afraid he is not at all well,” I said, softly, to his
+wife.
+
+She twisted her head a little, and glanced at him.
+
+“Well, I wish he’d improve!” she exclaimed.
+
+“A satin case, and a nice one!” said Miss Ruck to the shopman.
+
+I bade Mr. Ruck good-bye.  “Don’t wait for me,” he said, sitting there on
+his stool, and not meeting my eye.  “I’ve got to see this thing through.”
+
+I went back to the Pension Beaurepas, and when, an hour later, I left it
+with my luggage, the family had not returned.
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PENSION BEAUREPAS***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 2720-0.txt or 2720-0.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/7/2/2720
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
+States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive
+specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
+eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
+for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
+performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given
+away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks
+not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the
+trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
+Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country outside the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
+on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
+  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
+  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
+  United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you
+  are located before using this ebook.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
+other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
+Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+provided that
+
+* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
+  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+  Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
+  works.
+
+* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+  receipt of the work.
+
+* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The
+Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org 
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary 
+Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the
+mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its
+volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous
+locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt
+Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to
+date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
+official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+
+    Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+    Chief Executive and Director
+    gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+