We stepped outside into the clean well-aired vault of the twilight. The breeze was from the east, which in Provence of the South has not the terrors of our wind of that name, but is soft and perfumed with the early blossoms along the Gulf of Genoa. The Coast of Azure was sending us up an evening blessing.
We strolled a long way in silence, taking the river road which leads towards Aramon. Then Cremieux broke the silence by asking me brusquely if I had known Rhoda Polly long. I did not think the question ought to have been asked in that tone, but he had done a good deal for me that day and I most certainly owed him a civil answer.
"I have known Rhoda Polly," I said, "ever since I can remember. We used to fight in the garden for pig-nuts and in the woods for acorns. Rhoda Polly scratched my face with long sharp nails, and I thumped her back with little attention to chivalry. She could run faster than I, scratch more savagely, and when trapped she would sometimes bite like a little squirrel taken in the hand—yes, bite till the blood came."
Gaston Cremieux listened with a rather forced smile upon his lips. "And the others—were they present? Were you two allowed to run about the woods all by yourselves?"
You can change anything about a Frenchman except his idea concerning the co-education of the sexes. Here the anarchist is at one with Monsieur the Count de Mun, and Monsieur Jean Jaurès with the Archbishop of Paris.
The convent rule, whether applied by lay mistress or sister of the Sacré Cœur, constant supervision, a fiction of ignorance of things of the commonest knowledge, the girl never to be out of sight of her mother or aunt till the day she is delivered to her husband—these are what the heart of every Frenchman believes to be the only path which the girls he would marry should be allowed to tread. He may praise English and American methods, allow the charm of the result, but in his heart he prefers for himself his "snow-white gosling."
"Tell me about the college to which Rhoda Polly went," he continued, putting aside the early fightings and scratchings as too unsatisfactory for comment.
I told him of the restless yet ordered activity of Selborne College, of the work and of the professors, of the days when the students were permitted to receive young men of other colleges, properly introduced and vouched for. I dwelt mischievously upon the friendships which arose during the common intellectual life of these years. I pitched it all a little strong, because I could not see why in the world he could not take Rhoda Polly as she was, and accept her marked kindness to him without submitting her past to hostile analysis.
When I told him all, he seemed to shake himself suddenly as a man half awake by force of will breaks his way out of a bad dream.
"Good night," he said, "I must go back to Aramon."