“Oh! you may laugh. I am used to being laughed at about my doves; I don’t mind it,” said Franceline with a pretty toss of her small, haughty head.
“I am not laughing at you; I should be very sorry to call anything you loved by a name that hurt you,” protested the young man with a warmth that made Franceline look up from her dove at him; the fervor of the glance that met her did not cause her to avert her eyes, and brought no glow over her face. Three of the doves came flying down from the medlar-tree, scattering the starry-white blossoms in their flight. After making a few circles in the air, one perched on Franceline’s shoulder, and two alighted on her head. Clide thought it was the prettiest picture he had ever seen; and as he watched the soft little creatures nestling into the copper-colored hair, he wondered if this choice of a nest did not betray a little cunning, mingled with their native simplicity. But Franceline could not see the performance from this picturesque point of view. The two on her head were fighting, each trying to push the other off. She put up her hand to chase them away, but the claws of one got entangled in her hair, and the more it struggled, the more difficult it became to escape. Clide could not but come to her assistance; he disengaged the tenacious rose-leaves very deftly from the glossy meshes, and set the prisoner free.
“Naughty little bird!” said Franceline, shaking back her flushed face, and smoothing the slightly-dishevelled braids; and then, without a word of thanks to her deliverer, or otherwise alluding to the misconduct of her pets, she walked on towards the summer-house, and broke out into observations about the beauties of the neighborhood, asking her companion what he had seen and how he liked the country round Dullerton. She spoke English as fluently as a native, with only a slight foreign accentuation of the vowels that was too piquant to be a blemish; but every now and then a literal translation reminded you unmistakably that the speaker was a foreigner.
Clide thought the accent and the Gallicisms quite charming; he was, however, a little startled when the young lady, in pointing out the various places of the surrounding parts, and telling him who owned them, informed him very gravely that the pretty Mrs. Lawrence, who lived in that Elizabethan house with a clock-tower rising behind the wood, was thirty years younger than her rich husband, and had married him for his “propriety,” as she was very poor and had none of her own.
Franceline noticed the undisguised astonishment caused by this announcement, and, blushing up with a little vexation, exclaimed: “I mean for his property! You know in French propriété means property.” But after this she insisted on talking French. Clide protested he liked English much better, and vowed that she spoke it in perfection; but it was no use.
“English is too serious for conversation, and too stiff,” said Franceline, revenging herself for her blunder on the innocent medium of it, as we are all apt to do. “It is only fit for sermons and speeches. In French you can talk for an hour without saying anything, and it doesn’t matter. French is like a light, airy little carriage that only wants a touch to send it spinning along, and, once going, it will go on for ever; but English is a stagecoach, stately and top-heavy, and won’t go without passengers to steady it and horses to draw it. Foolish thoughts always sound so much more foolish in English than in French. People who are not serious and wise should always talk French.”
“Ah! merci, now I see why you insist on my talking it,” said Clide, laughing.
“It would have been a rash judgment; I could not tell whether you were wise or not.”
“I dare say you are right, though it never occurred to me before,” he remarked deprecatingly. “Our robust Anglo-Saxon is rather a clumsy vehicle for conversation compared with yours.”
“I did not call it clumsy; I said stately,” corrected Franceline.