woman nodded her meagre little head emphatically with a movement of bird-like satisfaction, and said:
"Oui! Oui! Bon! C’est ça! Qualms?
“Mais ça veut dire?” the other said inquiringly in a puzzled tone.
“Ça veut dire, chérie—you need have no qualms, madame—” the little wren-like woman considered carefully before she spoke—“Vous n’avez pas besoin de perturbation—n’est-ce pas?” she cried, with an eager look of triumph.
“Ah-h!” the other cried, with an air of great enlightenment. “Oui! Je comprends…. I assure you, madame, that you need have no qualms about the plumbing arrangements.”
“Bon! Bon!” the little woman nodded her head approvingly. “Plumbing, chérie. Plumbing,” she added gently as an afterthought.
“You will find everyt’ing t’oroughly modairne—”
“Thoroughly—” the other said, slowly and carefully. “Thoroughly—you pronounce it this way, my dear—th—th—” She leaned forward, inserting her tongue illustratively between her false teeth.
“Thoroughly,” the other said, with evident difficulty, and repeated—“thoroughly modairne—”
“Modern, dear! Modern!” the little wren-like woman said slowly and carefully again, but then, nodding her head with a movement of swift decision, she went on sharply: “Mais non! Ça va! Ça va bien!” She nodded her head vigorously. “Laissez comme ça! Les Américains aiment mieux comme ça—un peu d’accent, n’est-ce pas?” she said craftily. “Pour les Américains.”
“Ah, oui!” the other woman responded at once, nodding seriously. “Vous avez raison. Ce n’est pas bon de parler trop correctement. Un peu d’accent est mieux. Ils aiment ça—les Américains.”
They nodded wisely at each other, their faces comically eloquent with that strange union of avarice, hard worldliness, and provincial naïveté which qualifies a Frenchman’s picture of the earth. Then, looking up at the young man, who was standing awkwardly before the bureau, the younger of the two women said coldly:
“Monsieur?—”
The young woman was perhaps twenty-eight years old, but her cold, dark face, which was lean and sallow and cleft powerfully by a large strong nose, had the maturity of cold mistrustfulness and unyielding avarice which was incalculable. It was as if from birth her spirit had been steeped in the hard and bitter dyes of man’s iniquity, as if she had sucked the acid nutriment of mistrust
