The two potwallopers hooted richly at that.
“Monsieur is quick to launch insults,” said Mademoiselle Lambertine frigidly.
“Why, what have I said?”
The young man looked piously bewildered. St Denys sniggered—even, Ned could have thought, with a little note of vexation.
“Friend Edouard,” said he, “in Méricourt the portière Legrand stands pre-canonised.”
“Understand!” chuckled a bumpkin. “She is portière and a virgin—save that she bears the sins of the community.”
“Beast!” cried Théroigne. Then she went on sarcastically—“To belong to us! Oh yes! but it is likely, is it not? She who communes with the Blessed Virgin like a dear familiar.”
“It is so,” said St Denys. “That is her reputation.”
He was himself, for all his Jean-Jacques Pyrrhonism, an evident subscriber to a local superstition.
“Now,” said the perplexed Englishman, “I perceive that to be oneself is to invite resentment.”