“Oh, no, Frederika,” broke in Janice; “you need not have the slightest fear of his Excellency. He is everything that is kind and great and generous!”
“What!” exclaimed Mrs. Washington. “You know the general, then?”
“Oh, yes,” cried Janice, rapturously; “and if you but knew, Lady Washington, how we stand indebted to him at this very moment!”
The hostess smiled in response to the girl’s enthusiasm. “’T is certain he refused you nothing, Miss Meredith,” she said.
“Indeed, but he did,” answered Janice, merrily. “Wouldst believe it, Lady Washington, though perhaps ’t is monstrous bold of me to tell it, ’t is he that has had to keep me at a distance, for I have courted him most outrageously!”
“’T is fortunate,” replied the matron, “that he is a loyal husband, and that I am not a jealous wife, for ’t is a way all women have with him. What think you a Virginian female, who happened to be passing through camp, had the forwardness to say to me but t’ other day? ‘When General Washington,’ she writ, ‘throws off the hero and takes up the chatty, agreeable companion, he can be downright impudent sometimes, Martha,—such impudence as you and I, and every woman, always like.’”
“Ah,” asserted Madame de Riedesel, “ze goot men, zay all lofe us dearly. Eh, Janice?”
“What!” demanded the hostess. “Is your name Janice? Surely this is not my nice boy Jack’s Miss Meredith?”
The girl reddened and then paled. “I beg, Lady Washington—” she began; but the baroness, who had noted her change of colour, cut her off.
“You haf a lofer,” she cried, “and nevair one word to me told? Ach, ingrate! And your lofe I zought it was mine.