"Perhaps," he said, "there once was a de written before 'Nevers.'"
She laughed: "No. Father's family were always bourgeois shopkeepers—as I am."
He looked at the dainty girl beside him, with her features and slender limbs and bearing of an aristocrat.
"Too bad," he said, pretending disillusion. "I expected you'd tell me how your ancestors died on the scaffold, remarking in laudable chorus, 'Vive le Roi!'"
She laughed and sparkled deliciously: "Alas, no, monsieur. But, ma foi! Some among them may have worked the guillotine for Sanson or drummed for Santerre.
"You seem to me to symbolise all the grace and charm that perished on the Place de Grève."
She laughed: "Look again, and see if it is not their Nemesis I more closely resemble."
And as she said it so gaily, an odd idea struck him that she did embody something less obvious, something more vital, than the symbol of an aristocratic régime perishing en masse against the blood-red sky of Paris.
He did not know what it was about her that seemed to symbolise all that is forever young and fresh and imperishable. Perhaps it was only the evolution of the real world he saw in her opening into blossom and disclosing such as she to justify the darkness and woe of the long travail.
She had left him standing alone with Grenville's book open in his hands, and was now examining a figure wearing a coat of fine steel mail, with a black corselet protecting back and breast decorated with horizontal bands.