Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/70

, "There you've talked quite enough. After all, though my sister has queer ideas, we are not in your class. We are not peasants. And it's high time you remembered that." What she actually said in a curt tone was, "Where do we ring to make a call on your mistress?"

Jeanne understood the implication perfectly. It was one quite familiar to her. With a change of manner she motioned them silently across the hall. "There," she said laconically, her face suddenly hard and somber.

Rachel Hasparren also understood the implication and flushed an even more vivid color than that habitually on her dark cheeks. She held out her hand, her kid-gloved hand, to Jeanne, with a defiant gesture of equality, "Good-by, Jeanne. I'm glad we had a glimpse of you."

Jeanne took the hand awkwardly, with a sort of rancorous reluctance to have her grievance appeased, and turning back, shut the door behind her.

"Now, Rachel!" expostulated her sister.

Rachel breathed ragingly and stared at her sister in an old resentment, which the other took calmly, looking inside her card-case.

Rachel advanced provocatively, "Did you hear what old Jeanne said, how the American lady would not put a dog to sleep in lodgings in which we French expect to house our servants?"

The married sister resented this spiritedly. "Spoiling servants for the rest of us, that's what it is!" she said impatiently. "And what good does it do? You saw how old Jeanne only thinks the less of her for it. The more you try to do for that class, the less they think of you."

"That's because Jeanne's whole nature has been degraded by our caste ideals!" shouted Rachel. "She's a poor, superstitious, medieval old thing, incapable of ordinary decent human relations. If she'd lived in America…!"

Angèle pulled the other bell-cord here with an air of cutting short another outburst, and they both stood silently looking at the closed door, which presently was opened by little Isabelle.