Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/252

 abroad. In that clever little book, The Island, Mr. Whiteing depicts the love-making of this class in England as certainly the worst enemy of the French could never write with any semblance of truth of the same portion of the race in France. "Like their North-American sisters, fond of feathers and bright hues. No gaudier thing in nature than the coster-girl in her holiday dress of mauve, with the cruel plume that seems to have been dyed in blood. Relation of female to male, singular survival of primitive state. Love-making always, in form at least, an abduction of the virgin. A meeting at the street corner in the dusk for the beginning of the ceremony; then a chase round the houses, the heavy boots after the light ones, with joyous shrieks to mark the line of flight; after that the seizure, the fight, with sounding slaps for dalliance that might knock the wind out of a farrier of the Blues. In the final clutch skirts part in screeching rents, feathers strew the ground. Then the panting pair return hand in hand to the street corner, to begin again." Of the meeting of these dreadful lovers later in the public-house Mr. Whiteing adds—and here, too, he paints a picture exclusively British, that never could be seen in France: "Nightfall brings them together at the universal rendezvous from every near or distant scene; men and those that were once maidens, mumbling age and swearing