"But your friends—you would be sorry to leave them?"
"Oh, for that, I do not care about the people of Draginoules. It was my mother's place, not mine. I was born in Lyons, where my father was a silk-weaver. But he was a bad kind of man, so I came to my aunt to live. I do not think much of the people of Draginoules. They all like me, but I do not like them!"
"Why don't you go to England, then? Though I think you are far better here!" quoth Archie, on whom the glamour of the place was strong.
"My fiancé would kill himself," said Désirée serenely.
"Oh—you are fiancée?" murmured Archie, wondering why he felt that absurd mingling of relief and regret.
"To Auguste Colombini. He is a mechanician in Nice. We are to marry when he gets a rise. Hélas! je ne serai plus fille!"
Her words, so simply and directly spoken, caught at Archie's imagination—"Hélas! je ne serai plus fille!"
"What a vierge farouche!" he said to himself. "If I can get that feeling into my picture!" Aloud he said: "And your fiancé—he is very devoted, then?"
"He adores me. It is a perfect folly, see you, to feel for anyone what he does for me. He is mad about me."
She spoke with a calm arrogance that was very effective. How sure she was of her man! Was it a peculiarity of temperament in her or her fiancé that made such confidence possible? Archie flattered himself he was something of a student of human nature, and he absorbed all of Désirée that he could get in a spirit positively approaching that of the journalist.