“Oh, yes, mademoiselle!”
Ringing laughter followed, and they ate the cakes, and there were games, and dances in which there was something of the majestic minuet and something of the light gavotte.
“It does me good to see how happy they are,” Ethel said to herself. “Oh, how I should like to have all the world happy forever!”
They were to visit the Grojeans later, when everything should be finished at the camp. The countess had not yet arrived at her château, and Ethel profited by this to explore the country round about. Phil and Will, and even Caracal, who was living at the hotel, from time to time accompanied them. They made sketches and water-colors and talked over their impressions. In her walks Ethel wore a gray serge skirt adorned with large plaits, a bolero of the same stuff edged with white, silk shirt-waist, and a white straw hat; and with that she went up hill and down dale with the readiness of a college boy.
They saw France at home. The endless parceling out of properties and labor astonished them. Every one was half peasant and half workman, and had his own house and fields and vineyards. Thanks to the spirit of saving, want was unknown; and the variety of work made anything like a dead season impossible. When the workshop closed its doors, the workman took up his spade and cultivated his garden.
“I had no idea of anything like this,” Will said, with deep interest. What a rest for him, who had just left Chicago and the business strife, to find himself in the open country, where everything smiled around him!
Sometimes they met a wedding-party on the way—the bride in white, the groom in black, the old men in their blouses. A fiddler, the village barber, marched at the head, scraping out airs of the good old time.
They talked with housewives who were twirling their spindles on the threshold. They were asked to enter, and saw the great chimney with its fire-dogs, on which the soup was heating, and the dresser with its colored crockery shining in the shadow. Chickens pecked at their feet. When Phil and Will sat down at the old oaken table to taste the piquette (light wine) a familiar magpie perched on their shoulders and asked its share.
Issuing forth, they met the “priest-eater” of the village offering a pinch of snuff to Monsieur le Curé. Boys were coming back from school, shouting and rattling military marches on imaginary drums. For the girls were dancing and the boys playing their soldier-games, just as in the days of yore, when only the brave deserved the fair.
On the village signs, names and trades bore witness to the antiquity of the race and the power of its traditions.