Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/367

 to drown out what was going on inside her own mind, as to amuse the others that she did her liveliest best by the story, telling it with the gusto and brio which made her a favorite with people who liked youthful high spirits. It was broad farce, nothing else, and she did not draw back from the farcical color it needed to carry it off. It was a story, she told herself, that either made people laugh aux éclats, or it was a failure. Her audience was certainly laughing aux éclats when she finished the account of the homeric night-battle, laughing and wiping their eyes.

"That reminds me," said M. Vallery, his eyes glistening with mirth, "of a story about a love-sick dog that my uncle used to have."

"You're not going to tell that story here," announced his wife, with the calm accent of mastery, which once in a while slipped from her in an unguarded moment. He went through the form of protesting, claiming that it was nothing—now-a-days people were not prudish—but his wife settled the matter by taking the floor herself, turning to the girls, and saying laughingly, "That uncle of my husband's—he was one of the old school—out of a Balzac novel of the provinces. There aren't any more like him. It was through a to-the-death quarrel with him that Auguste and I met each other."

This slid her easily along into talk of early days, a quarter of a century before, when she was in one of the first lycées, at the time when lay-school teachers were an abomination and a hissing to the decent church-going bourgeois.

Dryly, with the inimitable terse picturesqueness of phrase which made her famous as a talker with people who demanded a great deal more than youthful high spirits, she took them back with her, twenty years, into the remote provincial city where she had encountered every narrowness possible to bigotry and reaction, and had wound it all around her little finger. Through her highly amusing recital of how she had played on the prejudices of those provincials, how adroitly she had employed against them their very vices, their jealousy and suspicion of each other, their grasping avarice, their utter dumb-beast ignorance of what modern education meant, through