“Bon jour, madame,” she answered, with a painstaking French which laid careful stress upon each silent letter and separated the words into an equal number of distinct sentences. At present, it was her latest linguistic accomplishment, and she aired it with manifest pride.
Pausing midway over the stile, the old woman brushed her face with the apron that hung above her tucked-up skirt.
“Why not you go to the church?” she asked.
Nancy breathed a sigh of relief, as the talk lapsed into her mother tongue. Like most Americans, she preferred that conversational eccentricities should be entirely upon the other side, and she questioned how far she could go upon the strength of her own three words. Nevertheless, she framed her reply on the idioms of her companion.
“Why for should I go?”
The woman set down her pail of water on the top step of the stile. Then she planted herself just below it, with her coarse boots resting on the crisp brown turf.
“We go to church, all the days,” she admonished Nancy sternly.
The girl smiled irrepressibly.
“So I have noticed,” she said, half under her breath. Then she added hastily, “But we do not.”
“Are you Catholique?”