Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/63

 to say something here this afternoon; and I'm going to say exactly what I think. Wouldn't you?"

"Of course I would," Ruth said.

"Then you forgive me?"

"For what?"

"Posing like such a self-righteous chump in a cab that you felt you ought to ask me what you should do!"

"You haven't been posing," Ruth denied for him again. "Why, when I saw you, what amazed me was that—" she stopped suddenly as she saw color come to his face.

"That I wasn't striking an attitude? Look here, I'm—or I was—one man in fifty thousand in the foreign legion; and one in thousands who've been in the air a bit. I'd no idea what I was getting into when they told me to come home here or I'd—" he stopped and shifted the subject from himself with abrupt finality. "You're going to France, Hub tells me. You've been there in peacetime, of course—Paris surely."

Ruth nodded. She had not thought that, as Cynthia, she must have been abroad until he was so certain of it.

"Did you ever go about old Paris and just poke around, Miss Gail?"

"In those quaint, crooked little streets which change their names every time they twist?"

"The Rue des Saints Pères, the Rue Pavée—that name rather takes one back, doesn't it? Some time ago it must have been when in Paris a citizen could describe where he lived by saying it was on 'the paved street.

"Yet it was only in the fifteenth century that wolves used to come in winter into Paris."

"To scare François Villon into his Lodgings for a