“You will think it absurdly priggish,” I said, “but you know I am half-French—at least, I live amongst the French, so I can’t afford to knock against their hautes convenances; and if I were seen walking with a gentleman without my mother or some married chaperon, it would make quite a scandale.”
“How inconceivably ridiculous!” cried Sybil, staring at me with round, shining eyes. “What a grand privilege it is to be a free-born American woman! I wouldn’t be a slave like you—no, not for the empire of France, Lilly!”
Pierre came to the door to announce Mr. Halsted’s arrival, and we all sallied into the drawing-room. Sybil burst out into regrets at having to go out, and then, pointing a finger of scorn at me, “Only fancy!” she cried—“you’ll hardly believe it, but it’s a fact—Miss Wallace says she dare not come out for a walk with you without her mother, lest it should make a scandal in the town! Did you ever hear anything so preposterously absurd, Mr. Halsted?” I crimsoned to the roots of my hair, and longed to choke Sybil on the spot. Happily, gentlemen being the same in all countries, Mr. Halsted saw my embarrassment and turned it off with easy good breeding.
“Miss Wallace has been brought up in France,” he said. “It is quite natural she should have adopted the notions and manners of the country; but it’s rather hard on us poor fellows. We are cut off from our most cherished prerogatives here in this centre of civilization. May I call this evening? You promised to teach me the Polish mazurka?”
Sybil hesitated. There was to be a dinner-party that evening, so the dancing lesson could hardly take place, and I knew he wanted to figure in the mazurka at a Polish house the next night.
“I can’t this evening,” she said musingly; then, as if moved by a sudden inspiration, she flung down her muff. “I see I must victimize myself for my country’s sake, and give up my walk to save you from making an exhibition of yourself to-morrow before the assembled nations. You two go and take your walk alone.”
Mr. Halsted entered a feeble protest, which Sybil did not even so much as notice, but proceeded to take off her bonnet and prepare for the dancing lesson.
We were not long on the road together when Millicent opened the subject of religion; Sybil’s idea of “thinking it over” being the ostensible pretext.
“I wonder you don’t talk to her about it,” she said; “you might do a good work in that direction, if you tried.”
“By making a Catholic of Sybil?”