“You never play, of course?”
“Why not?” she asked, with a snap in her eyes and voice. “Why shouldn’t I play? Why do I go there except to play?”
Jack was not to be put down where his principles were concerned, and he answered, fearlessly, but politely:
“I did not suppose nice people like you played there. I have been taught that it was wrong, just like any gambling.”
“Puritan, as well as American,” madame said, with a look which ought to have silenced the boy; but he stood his ground, and answered:
“I am not a Puritan; I am an Episcopalian, and father is a vestryman.”
Michel had come in time to hear the last remark, and he burst into a hearty laugh, in which even madame joined, although she scarcely saw the point. Puritans and Episcopalians and vestrymen were the same to her. They were all Americans, whom she disliked and looked down upon. It was impossible to be very social with her, and, if it had ever occurred to me to ask her about Nicol Patoff, I should have abandoned the idea. But the house seemed full of him, and I could not help feeling that it was this way it had looked when he lived there. We did not go into Nicol’s den, where the portrait was; the door was shut, and I dared not take the liberty of asking to have it opened. Michel was a very different-looking man at home in evening dress from what he was on the street as a gendarme. Now he was the host, and a delightful one, as he talked mostly to Jack, asking him of life in Washington, and seeming greatly amused at the boy’s enthusiasm and patriotism, which would not admit that there was any land so fair as his own country.
“That’s right, my boy; stand up for your own. I half wish I were a citizen of the United States, and sometimes think I may yet go to them to live.”
He looked first at me, and then at his mother, whose eyes flashed with scorn, as she said:
“Are you crazy, to talk such rubbish?”