Page:The youth of Washington (1910).djvu/145

 The chevalier, by good fortune, spoke English enough to make his company very agreeable, and I became sure, as I spent some days in his society, that he made no attempt to deceive me; for nothing could have been more plain than that he meant to hold the country for his king.

He was pleased to relate his campaigns in Europe, and, although he was apt, like old soldiers, to be lengthy as to these, I found him to be instructive.

He talked lightly of women, but so did his officers, and in a manner we in Virginia should have considered to be unmannerly or worse. Also he told me that the French encouraged their soldiers to take wives among the young squaws, a thing our people never inclined to do. He seemed to have known many English gentlemen who had been in Paris, and even why Lord Fairfax had left England, all of which story I could have heard from him if I had thought proper so to do, which I did not. He did say, and was very merry about it, that if a woman drove his lordship to America, another might drive him back, for, after all, we were only shuttlecocks, and were knocked to and fro by the women—and I might say