"You always like French," said his wife, contemptuously. "I guess you gut somethin' French inside you."
Claude, for some reason or other, probably because, usually without an advocate, he now knew that he had one in Vesper, was roused to unusual animation. He snatched his pipe from his mouth and said, warmly, "It's me 'art that's French, an' sometimes it's sore. I speak not much, but I think often we are fools. Do the Eenglish like us? No, only a few come with us; they grin 'cause we put off our French speakin' like an ole coat. A man say to me one day, 'You 'ave nothin'. You do not go to mass, you preten' to be Protestan', w'en you not brought up to it. You big fool, you don' know w'at it is. If you was dyin' to-morrer you'd sen' for the priest.'"
Mirabelle Marie opened her eyes wide at her husband's eloquence.
He was not yet through. "An' our children, they are silly with it. They donno' w'at they are. All day Sunday they play; sometimes they say cuss words. I say, 'Do it not,' 'an' they ast me w'y. I cannot tell. They are not French, they are not Eenglish. They 'ave no religion. I donno' w'ere they go w'en they die."
Mirabelle Marie boldly determined to make confidences to the Englishman in her turn.
"The English have loads of money. I wish I could go to Boston. I could make it there,—yes, lots of it."
Claude was not to be put down. "I like our own langwidge, oh, yes," he said, sadly. "W'en I was a leetle boy I wen' to school. All was Eenglish. They put in my 'and an Eenglish book. I'd lef my mother, I was stoopid. I thought all the children's teeth was broke, 'cause they spoke so strange. Never will I forgit my firs' day in school. W'y do they teach Eenglish to the French? The words was like fish 'ooks in my flesh."
"Would you be willing to send that little girl down the Bay to a French convent?" said Vesper, waving his cigarette towards Bidiane.
"We can't pay that," said Mirabelle Marie, eagerly.
"But I would."