Certain memories reddened Eve; but the natural curiosity to compare experiences got the better of her maiden reticence upon so delicate a subject. She lowered her voice.
"Do you yell?" she asked. "I do. It frightens them if you yell."
"I was never spanked" said Fitz. "When I'm naughty mamma writes to papa, and he writes to me, and says he's sorry to hear that I haven't yet learned to be a gentleman, and a man of the world, and an American. That's worse than being spanked."
"Oh, dear!" said Eve, "I don't mind what people say; that's just water on a duck's back; but what they do is with slippers—"
"And," cried Fitz, elated with his own humor, "it isn't on the duck's—back."
"Are you yourself to-day," asked Miss Eve, her eyes filling, "or are you just unusually horrid?"
"Here—I say—don't blub," said Fitz, in real alarm. And, knowing the power of money to soothe, he pulled a twenty-franc gold piece from his pocket and himself opened and closed one of her tiny hands upon it.
The child's easy tears dried at once.
"Really—truly?—ought I?" she exclaimed.
"You bet!" said Fitz, all his beautiful foreign culture to the fore. "You just keep that and surprise yourself with a present next time you want one."