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42 nothing of countrywomen, if he could; but that matter had not been settled for him and there is a difficulty in settling it for one's self. Born in Paris, he had been brought up altogether on French lines, in a family which French society had irrecoverably absorbed. His father, a Carolinian and a Catholic, was a Gallomaniac of the old American type. His three sisters had married Frenchmen, and one of them lived in Brittany and the others much of the time in Touraine. His only brother had fallen, during the terrible year, in defence of their adoptive country. Yet Gaston, though he had had an old Legitimist marquis for his godfather, was not legally one of its children: his mother had, on her deathbed, extorted from him the promise that he would not take service in its armies; she considered, after the death of her elder son (Gaston, in 1870, was a boy of ten), that the family had been patriotic enough for courtesy.

The young man therefore, between two stools, had no clear sitting-place: he wanted to be as American as he could and yet not less French than he was; he was afraid to give up the little that he was and find that what he might be was less—he shrank from a flying leap which might drop him in the middle of the sea. At the same time he was aware that the only way to know how it feels to be an American is to try it, and he had many a purpose of making the westward journey.