“It is because we only know a few words,” said Helen. “I should like to causer like Mademoiselle Blanchette, but——”
“Ah!” cried Margot, “here is a beginning! Mademoiselle is ten times more pretty when her face lights up. When we allow ourselves to criticise, this is what we say of the English—‘They are too serious; they have what we call figures de bois.’ When one chatters, when one smiles, all is changed. She is charming, la petite.”
“What is she saying about la petite?” said Janey. “La petite, that is me! I want to know what she says.”
“Je dis que vous êtes charmante, mademoiselle,” cried Margot, with a laugh. “You see I understand the English. If the little demoiselle will condescend to amuse herself with my little Marion and Petit-Jean, she will soon learn to chatter like the rest. Monsieur your father speaks very good French, and I hear that he knows himself in affairs to perfection, mademoiselle. They say he had the best bargain of all in the ‘vente des bois,’ and that he will make enormously by it. Ah, the English, they are the people for affairs!” said Margot, admiringly. “But to imagine that one like monsieur should have taken the trouble to come all this way to little Latour for the ‘vente des bois!’ That shows how the English always have their wits about them, while we, who are on the spot, and who ought to know, we are so bête, we let those good bargains slip out of our hands.”
“We did not hear of it in England,” said Helen; “we were travelling——”
“Ah! and one knows how to join affairs to one’s pleasure when one is English. It is extraordinary; they never forget themselves,” Margot said. “But monsieur is rich?” she added interrogatively. “It makes nothing to him to gain a little, to take the profits out of another’s hands. It is pour s’amuser, to distract himself, to forget the ennui which is peculiar to the English.”
“We were once rich,” said Helen, “but we are not rich now; papa says so. And we have no ennui, as you call it, in England,” she cried indignantly.
Margot smiled; she could forgive the patriotic denial, but she was aware that she knew better. “All the same,” she said, “it must be sad to live in a perpetual fog and never to see the sun. For that I could never support your England, notwithstanding all that you have there. Of what use is wealth when you cannot see the sky?” said Margot. Helen was too indignant to reply.
But in the course of the first day she got a great deal of information from Margot, who told her all about the young ladies at the château, who talked English comme deux diablesses, the woman said—and who were indeed English-mad, and betrothed, one of them, to an Englishman. When Helen asked once more in her halting French, whether they were très-agréables, meaning “very nice,” Margot answered with a shrug of her shoulders—
“I do not know anything to the contrary. What does that matter to us others if the aristocrats are agréable or not? They are not as we are, they are not of us. They have got their château and their bois, and all that, though many people think they have no right, and should not be allowed to retain it. But I say to my man, ‘What is that to us? We have not the money to buy it. Let them stay. Madame la Comtesse is better than old Père Goudron, who would buy it all if it were taken away from them. So why should we interfere?’ That is what I always say——”