“I see you’ve got the same aspirations,” Francie remarked kindly.
“The same aspirations?”
“Those you told me about that day at Saint-Germain.”
“Oh I keep forgetting that I ever broke out to you that way. Everything’s so changed.”
“Are you the proprietor of the paper now?” the girl went on, determined not to catch this sentimental echo.
“What do you care? It wouldn’t even be delicate in me to tell you; for I DO remember the way you said you’d try and get your father to help me. Don’t say you’ve forgotten it, because you almost made me cry. Anyway, that isn’t the sort of help I want now and it wasn’t the sort of help I meant to ask you for then. I want sympathy and interest; I want some one to say to me once in a while ‘Keep up your old heart, Mr. Flack; you’ll come out all right.’ You see I’m a working-man and I don’t pretend to be anything else,” Francie’s companion went on. “I don’t live on the accumulations of my ancestors. What I have I earn—what I am I’ve fought for: I’m a real old travailleur, as they say here. I rejoice in it, but there’s one dark spot in it all the same.”
“And what’s that?” Francie decided not quite at once to ask.
“That it makes you ashamed of me.”
“Oh how can you say?” And she got up as if a sense of oppression, of vague discomfort, had come over her. Her visitor troubled such peace as she had lately arrived at.
“You wouldn’t be ashamed to go round with me?”