“Maxim for travelers: Always begin your first trip to France at Saint Malo,” announced Betty Wales, after they had explored the quaint old town a little. Babbie and Madeline, the traveled contingent, agreed that it was “just as dear and almost as dirty” as anything in Italy, which was Madeline’s standard of real charm. Babe, being in a state of subdued and pensive melancholy, said nothing and thought a great deal—but not about Saint Malo. Madeline and Babbie supposed she was missing John until Babe, unable to endure their constant chaffing any longer, informed them curtly that she never wished to see him again as long as she lived. Having freed her mind, she felt a little better; but she sternly rejected sympathy, even from Betty, refused to confide in Babbie, though the B’s had always told one another everything, and spent most of her time on the hotel piazza facing the sea, sitting in one of the hooded beach chairs that abound at all the continental watering-places. The hood of this particular one was lined with pink flowered cretonne, and it was so becoming that Babbie declared it was a perfect shame the effect should be lost.
“John would do anything she wanted if he could see her in that chair,” she declared. “As for her not wanting to see him, she’s simply dying to this very minute. Won’t it be interesting watching them make up in Paris?”
“Almost as interesting as it is watching Betty buy post-cards in French,” laughed Madeline.
“I don’t care if I am funny,” declared Betty stoutly. “I’m learning. I can say almost anything I want to now, only I have to look up some words in my dictionary. I’ve written my family that you can learn more French here in a week than you do in a year at Harding.”
“That’s a base slander on Harding,” returned Madeline promptly. “Here you are engaging the entire time of two excellent tutors,—meaning me and Miss Hildreth,—besides getting incidental instruction from nearly every inhabitant of the town. You ought to be learning a little something, my child.”
“You never bought a dictionary either, at Harding,” put in Babbie. “You used to borrow Nita’s.”
Betty’s diminutive French dictionary had been her first purchase in Saint Malo. In the crowd of porters and custom-house officials on the landing-wharf she had discovered that she knew even less French than she had supposed, and Madeline’s and Babbie’s easy intercourse with the hotel servants and shop-keepers filled her with envy and despair.
“I will learn,” she declared. “I never wanted to particularly before, but now I want to more than anything. I won’t be carried along on this trip like a piece of baggage, having to call one of you whenever I want to ask for hot water or buy a postage stamp.”
So she bought her dictionary and carried it with her everywhere, bringing it out on all occasions, to the intense amusement of Babbie and Madeline, who criticised her accent mercilessly, taught her the most complicated idioms they could remember, and assisted her progress by making her inquire the way about the town, do their shopping as well as her own, and even flounder through protracted interviews with the fat and obtuse old woman who rented bath-houses and suits on the rocks just below the wall that encircled the town. With such strenuous practice it was certainly no wonder, as Madeline had pointed out, that Betty’s progress was rapid.
Saint Malo is a tiny, sleepy town, shut in by a great wall. Its narrow, crooked streets are lined with tall stone houses, there is a lovely old church towering over everything, and on all sides, when the tide is high, is the sea. At low tide there are great stretches of ugly yellow sand flats, where it is not safe to walk because of treacherous quicksands, and over which the incoming sea rushes “faster than a horse can gallop,” so the natives tell you proudly. But there are small bathing beaches close to the wall; there is the wall to promenade on; there are the dark, stuffy little shops in the town where one buys Brittany ware and Cluny lace, all “très bon marché,” of bright-eyed peasant women in caps and sabots; and everywhere there is the fascinating foreign atmosphere that is, after all, the crowning feature in the charm of traveling.