Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/251

 least boastful of the world. With these cleanly and self-respecting toilers there is no insane aping of the idler, no cheap imitation of the bourgeoise in dress, no awful spectacle of girls with hideous feathers and hats the grossest assertion of ill-placed ambition. Finery of any kind is recognised as the advertisement of something worse than bad taste,—of the bonnet gone clean over the mill and morals gone after it. The peasant woman's vanity is to dress as her mother dressed before her, her pride is to belong to her land and her people. And it is because of this wholesome vanity and this noble pride that France is France, and the land is such a pleasant one to travel over.

This hard-working race is not without its amusements. It must, as I have said, have its share of the joys of life. They are never too tired after a day's work to dance to the music and measure of song, which they love; and whenever you chance upon them congregated for diversion, whether at a fair, on a moonlit sward, over a hilarious meal, you will always find their behaviour seemly and their gaiety attractive and measured. If the feathers and hats of holiday trim of Great Britain are lacking here, so also are the repulsive giggles and the hateful love-making of those latitudes. The French, we know, are not patterns of virtue, but they certainly are patterns of deportment