why are you here?… What are you doing here in Orléans, eh?” she said imperatively, yet coaxingly. “What brings you here, my boy?”
“Why—why—” he stammered confusedly, and then finding no adequate reason (since there was none) for being there, he blurted out—“I’m—a writer—a—a—journalist,” he stammered, feeling this made his lie the less.
“Ah—hah—hah,” she chuckled softly again with a kind of abstracted gluttony of satisfaction—“a journalist, eh, my boy?” In her ravenous eagerness she had begun to pat and stroke his arm with a claw-like hand, as a cook might stroke a fat turkey before killing it. “A journalist, eh?… Yvonne! Yvonne!” suddenly she turned to the other woman again, speaking rapidly in a burst of high excitement. “The young man is a journalist… an American journalist… he writes for The New York Times, Yvonne… the greatest newspaper in America.”
“Well, not exactly that,” he blundered, red in the face from confusion and embarrassment. “I never said—”
“Ah—hah—hah,” the little old woman said again with her little gloating laugh, peering up at him with a crafty gleam in her sharp old eyes, and stroking his arm in her unconscious eagerness. “… And you’ve come to write about us, eh?… Joan of Arc, eh?” she said seducingly, with a little crafty laugh of triumph. “—The Cathedral… the Maid of Orléans… ah, my boy, you have come to the right place…. I will show you everything…. I will take care of you…. You are in good hands now…. Ah-h, we love the Americans here…. Yvonne! Yvonne!” she cried again, her excitement growing all the time. “He says he is here to write about Orléans for The New York Times… he will put it all in… the Cathedral… Joan of Arc… the hotel here… the greatest paper in America… millions of people will come here when they read it—”
“Well, now, I never said—” he began again.
“Ah—hah—hah,” again she was peering up at him craftily, with old eyes of eager greed, chortling her little laugh of gloating triumph, as she stroked his arm. “Twenty-four, eh?… And where are you from, my boy?… Where is your home?”
“Why—New York, I suppose,” he said hesitantly.
“Yes, yes, I know,” she said impatiently—“but before that? Where were you born?… What State are you from?”
He stared at her for a moment with bewildered face.
