Julie then fell to sewing again more rapidly than before.
“Oh well, I don’t see why I am not allowed to say what I wish! There is no harm. You are always too afraid of realities, that is why I do not think, Marguerite, that you are suited to making your own way. But of course, any one who is as pretty as you are, is sure to marry fairly soon, so I suppose I need not trouble about your future!”
This time Marguerite Arnot, in spite of her annoyance, laughed.
“See here, Julie, what a ridiculous child you are. Some of the time you are so wise that one forgets you are only fourteen. Yet you are old enough to understand that I can never marry. In the first place even in ordinary times no French girl marries without her dot and I have nothing. Besides, the war has destroyed nearly a million and a half of our men. If I possessed a dowry perhaps I might some day marry a wounded soldier in order to care for him; I suppose a good many French girls will do this. I do not think I altogether envy them.”
“There are other men to marry beside Frenchmen. I heard the Camp Fire girls talking the other night and they declared no American ever expects his wife to have a dowry unless she happens to be extremely rich in her own right. Even when the parents are wealthy, they rarely give their daughters anything until their death. I have been thinking recently that perhaps a good many of our French girls may marry American soldiers. Indeed I know a few of them who expect to do this. I rather think I should like to marry an American!”
“Well, suppose you do not discuss the subject for another four or five years, Julie,” the other girl answered, perhaps a little primly. “So far as I am concerned I wish you would not talk of it at all.”
“Oh, very well, Marguerite Arnot, but it is because you care too much and not too little,” Julie responded. “What shall we talk about? I can’t sew without talking. Why not tell me all you have been able to find out about the Camp Fire girls? I don’t presume it is very much, but at least it will be enough for me to start on and I can find out the rest later.”
Marguerite sighed, shaking her head in a discouraged fashion.
“Julie, I wish you had known my mother for a few years of your life! She would have been able to teach you what I do not seem to succeed in accomplishing. Yet there are some things one cannot teach a human being, one ought to know them instinctively. And these are the things you so often do not know, Julie, that I can’t tell where to begin with you. But then you have never had any kind of training. Still I shall of course be happy to tell you what I know of the Camp Fire girls since it is only what they have wished me to know.”
Julie shrugged her thin little French shoulders.