Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/256

 talking English again. Girls, she moaned dejectedly, were most unhappy creatures in France; they had no pleasures, no freedom. She could not take her beautiful big dog Tom, given her as a puppy in Warwickshire, out for a walk because it is not proper in France for a young girl to be seen out-of-doors with a dog. Poor little martyr, she did not look much of a victim, and missing and yearning for the larger ways of England had not thinned or paled her rosy, vivacious, round visage. Here she was, as happy as a queen because she was going to sleep on her grandmother's sofa that a stranger from whom she would take no money might sleep comfortably in her bed. She insisted on carrying my bag, too, as if that were another beaming source of satisfaction; and as we trudged blithely up from the valley of the station to the quaint street in which a quaint, dim-eyed old man lived and made and mended watches in an altitude rivalling the stars, I saw that Jeanne was a popular personage. Not this the timid French girl who slips in and out of life unnoticed, and says, Oui, monsieur; Non, monsieur, to the trousered wolves. The station-master cast her a cordial nod; the doctor, climbing into his gig, heard her speak English, and turned with a big, gruff laugh as he waved his hand to her. "There's Mlle. Jeanne, happy at last. She is able to calumniate us all in good English to an