“Everywhere in Paris,” she answered, with her beautiful smile. “She has made many friends among us because of her love, so very great, for our dear France.”
“Tiens!” said Armand de Vaux, on the other side of Bertram, “Monsieur is the husband of Miladi Joyce! She is exquisite! An English rose! Monsieur will pardon me if I confess that I fell desperately in love with her!”
“It’s impossible to avoid that tribute!” said Kenneth. “Bertram Pollard knows that all his friends are the slaves of his wife’s beauty. Isn’t it so?”
He spoke in French, and his words sounded chevaleresque and romantic, with a lighter touch than they would have had in English. At that “Is it not so?” he looked at Bertram, and their eyes met. Kenneth’s smile seemed a little quizzing, as though he knew his friend’s quick jealousy.
Bertram felt no kind of objection to Armand de Vaux’s declaration of “desperate love,” though he was conscious of some secret reaction to Kenneth’s endorsement.
“I am glad Joyce is so much admired,” he said simply.
Armand de Vaux paid a tribute to English womanhood. Most of his knowledge of English character, as a young man, had been gained from reading translations of Shakespeare during his service militaire in the barracks at Belfont. He had fallen in love with Rosalind, Beatrice, and Katherine, above all with Beatrice, who was, he thought, essentially English and Elizabethan. But he believed from better evidence than that of reading, that English womanhood had retained that Elizabethan quality of character—frankness, simplicity, courage, and above all, a playfulness of spirit.
Mme. de Vaux tapped her husband’s hand.
“None of your amorous reminiscences here, Armand. Every one knows that you are a monster of infidelity.”
“Before marriage I was a romantic,” he admitted with simple self-satisfaction. “Since marriage I have been a model of single-hearted devotion. It is still possible, however, that I may one day sow my last peck of wild oats.”