Romain laughed at him after dinner.
“My dear boy!” he said, “what on earth did you say to La Belle Américaine to make her deluge poor Le Blanc with her atrocious French. He says she gave him a tooth ache; were you trying to snub her?”
Jean flushed scarlet.
“You did not tell me she had no manners!” he muttered.
Romain laughed again.
“My poor child,” he said, “good manners are historical nowadays; they are the survival of race. One does not expect them from Americans; they have—those charming children of yesterday—nothing to survive from. It is true one hears of the Pilgrim Fathers, but that can hardly be looked upon as a satisfactory pedigree, particularly as one gathers from the absence of all allusion to the mothers that ‘ces gens-là’ married beneath them! I don’t offer people advice as a rule, it might bore them and it would certainly bore me; still I will go so far as to say to you that you mustn’t think too much about manners. You see the rich have inherited the earth, but they’ve kept, poor dears, the manners of the soil, and it’s considered a little diplomatic just now to meet them half way. You take me, perhaps? An air just a little less rigid than your own, my dear Jean, will find itself more at home in Paris. Don’t trouble to go into the drawing-room again; if you’re tired go to bed.”
Jean escaped with relief. He thought his Uncle Romain fascinating, but he felt horribly raw and exposed, and quite appallingly young. When he reached his room he found that Henri had unpacked all his things, and put the thermometer and the medal on the dressing-table. There was an absence of direct utility about these memorials that went to Jean’s very heart.
At the sight of his incompetent treasures, all the jumbled impressions of the day rose up before him, the surprises, the shames, the bewilderments, and the loneliness. He too, like them, had nothing about him that seemed fitted to shine in this new existence; but they were more fortunate than he, for they did not lie awake far into the night wishing that they were ten years older, and could talk without meaning anything, and had a new dress-coat.
They lay on the dressing-table surrounded by beautiful silver ornaments, quite as if they were on the old wooden washing-stand in St. Jouin and not in the least aware of any depreciation in their value.