"Oh, I dare say I shouldn't succeed," I laughed, his air striking me as a little more earnest than the occasion demanded. "I should probably fail, just as the police did."
"In France," he remarked, "it is not in the least expected that men of the law should——"
"Nor is it here," I explained. "Only, of course, a lawyer can't help it, sometimes; some cases demand more or less detective work, and are yet too delicate to be intrusted to the police."
"It is also the fault of our police that it is too fond of the newspapers, of posing before the public—it is a fault of human nature, is it not?"
"You speak English so well, Mr. Martigny," I said, "that I have wondered where you learned it."
"I was some years in England—the business of wine—and devoted myself seriously to the study of the language. But I still find it sometimes very difficult to understand you Americans—you speak so much more rapidly than the English, and so much less distinctly. You have a way of running your words together, of dropping whole syllables——"
"Yes," I smiled, "and that is the very thing we complain of in the French."
"Oh, our elisions are governed by well-defined laws which each one comprehends, while here——"
"Every man is a law unto himself. Remember, it is the land of the free——"
"And the home of the license, is it not?" he added, unconscious of irony.