"For example?"
"Well, for example, French women. Even so far as my own town of Boston we know you're beautiful, and beautifully gowned, although nothing short of personal experience can teach one to what an extent. But I've always been brought up to believe that you were so hemmed in by conventionality, so strictly watched, that a chap wasn't allowed so much as to say 'Good-morning' to one of you, so long as you were unmarried, at least, except under the eyes of mothers and fathers and guardians. But it seems that it's not so at all."
As he spoke, Mademoiselle Tremonceau's lips parted in a little smile, and as he paused, she slipped in an apparently irrelevant question.
"Are you married, Mr. Vane?"
"Good gracious, no!" said Andrew. "I suppose I may as well confess that I'm only twenty."
Mademoiselle Tremonceau looked off across the track to where, in the interval preceding the next race, the restless thousands circled to and fro about the betting-booths of the pelouse, in the manner of a multitude of ants preparing to carry off a bulky bit of carrion. Then she drew her veil tight, with a charmingly feminine little moue which shortened her upper lip, tilted her chin, and set her eyelids fluttering.
"Twenty?" she echoed. "My age precisely. Tiens! C'est plutô drôlatique ça! Here's Mr. Radwalader, at last. Did you get your payment? Only twenty-two fifty? Well, that is your other louis back, at all events. Don't you want to run along after the carriage, as long as you know how? Mr. Vane will attend to me, I'm sure, and we'll meet you at the right of the main entrance. Here's the carriage number. Simon is the brigadier in charge to-day. Tell him it's for me, and you won't have to wait."
Radwalader undertook this commission with cheerfulness, although the pace at which he started toward the gate was distinctly incompatible with even the most liberal conception of "running along." Evidently he was not unique in his abhorrence of the crush at the end. Many were already making their way from the pesage, and the crowd behind the tribunes was densest about the sorties. Andrew and Mademoiselle Tremonceau followed him, five minutes later.
"I wonder if you mind my taking your arm?" asked the girl. "I'm always a little nervous, going out."