“Here are people,” Will said, “who know how to amuse themselves.”
“Is it a secret, monsieur?” asked Yvonne.
“To be content with what one has,” answered Will. “You have a French proverb about it: ‘S’il n’y en a pas, il n’en faut pas’ [‘What you can’t have, you don’t need’]—and that is right—don’t you think so, mademoiselle?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Yvonne; “you seem to know the French people better than I.”
The rare charm of Mlle. de Grojean, her innate simplicity and inherited refinement, seemed to Will like the perfect expression of all he loved in France. He, who was so taciturn, would have talked on for hours only to see the manner, at once coquettish and reserved, with which Yvonne listened to him.
“My impression of France is this,” said Will: “it is holiday every day, and the next day you begin again.”
“You see everything in rose-color, M. Rowrer,” Yvonne remarked.
“No,” said Ethel, who, in her walks around the camp, had often visited the poor—“no, it’s not all the time holiday for everybody.”
“I know that, too,” Will replied; “life is as hard here as anywhere else; but it is the only country where you can give yourself the illusion that it is easy.”
They had come to the end of the central alley. Followed by grand’mère and grandma, they had passed by the Pretty Shepherdess of the Alps—a woman of formidable proportions painted on canvas, in company with three white goats, not far from the booth of the bearded woman. Just there the group behind would have lost the forward group, if it had not been for Mme. Riçois, who elbowed her way with energy through the crowd, which, at this spot, pressed together like the current in a narrow strait. An immense lottery-wheel was turning with a noise like the wind.