This was rather a “oner,” but I came up manfully. “Ah, that’s—that’s because you’re English, don’t you see?”
“Oh,” she murmured, apparently accepting the reason as sufficient.
Then I ventured to sound her a little.
“You like them, you find them pleasant, the girls at the hotel?”
“Yes, I like them,” she answered deliberately. “Of course, their ways aren’t quite English, are they? But I suppose one must expect French girls to be different. They seem intelligent and good-natured, and they’ve been very nice to me.”
“I dare say you don’t always understand each other?” I suggested.
“Oh dear no. That is what prevents our being intimate. French is so difficult, and they talk so fast. It’s as much as I can do to understand the masters at the school, though they speak very slowly and clearly, because they know I’m English. But I think I’m learning a little. I can understand a great deal more than I could when I first came. Do all French girls smoke cigarettes? I knew that Spanish and Russian women did, but I didn’t know it was the custom in France.”
“Yes, decidedly,” I said to myself,
“Chalks is right. There’s something ‘queer,’ about her.”
But how to reconcile the theory of her “queerness” with the fact of her residence here alone among us in the Latin Quarter of Paris? Assuming her to be a well brought-up, innocent young English girl, how in the name of verisimilitude had she contrived to get so far astray from her natural orbit?