Va m’en chercher une assiettée, morbleu, Marion.
Les petits oiseaux les ont toutes mangées, mon Dieu, mon ami.
Marion! ... je te couperai ta tête, morbleu, Marion.
Et puis que ferez-vous du reste, mon Dieu, mon ami?
Je le jetterai par la fenêtre, morbleu, Marion,
Les chiens, les chats en feront fête....”
She interrupted herself in order to fling out his words with the gesture and intonation that Numa used when he got excited. “There, look you, me children! ’tis as foine as Shakespeare.”
“Yes, a picture of manners and customs,” said Rosalie, coming up to her, “the husband gross and brutal, the wife catlike and mendacious—a true household in Provence!”
“Oh, my dear child,” said Mme. Le Quesnoy, in a tone of gentle reproof, the tone that is used when ancient quarrels have become the habit. The piano-stool whisked quickly around and brought face to face with Rosalie the cap of the furious little Provence girl.
“’Tis really too much! what harm has it ever done to you, our South? as for me, I adore it! I did not know it at the time, but that voyage you made me take revealed to me my real country. It is no use to have been baptized at St. Paul’s; I belong down there, I do—I am a child of the ‘little square.’ Do you know, Mamma, some one of these days we will just leave these cold Northerners planted right here, and we two will go down to live in our beautiful South, where people sing and dance—the South of the winds, of the sun, of the mirage, of everything that makes one poetic and widens one’s life—