and opulent vistas that one finds in France, an architecture of proud, comely space into whose proportionate dimensions even nature herself has been compelled. It was a tremendous sweep of velvet sward, that faded into misty distances and that was cut cleanly on each side by the smoky denseness of her forest parks. Her shrewd eyes ranged across this noble prospect for a moment in an expression of chilled distaste. Then, with a slight contracted shudder of her folded arms, she turned, and said wearily:
“Ah, zis vintaire! Zis vintaire! Sometimes I s’ink it vill nevaire end. Every day,” she went on indignantly, “it rain, rain, rain! All vintaire lonk I see noz-zing but rain! I get up in ze mornink and look out—and it rain! I turn my beck and zen look out again—it rain! I take a nep, I get up, I go to bet—always it rain!” She shrugged her shoulders comically and turning to the boy with a glint of shrewdly cynical humour, she said, “I s’ink if it keep on ve’ave again—vat you call it?—Noah’s Floot, eh?”
The Countess clucked sympathetically at this watery chronicle of woe, and said:
“But have you been here by yourself all winter? I should think you would get awfully lonely, my dear,” she went on in a tone of ingratiating commiseration. “I know how you must miss your son.”
“No. I vas in Paris for two veeks in Decembaire,” said La Marquise. “But it rain zere too,” she said, with another shrug of comic despair, and then added vigorously, “No! I do not get lonely if it do not rain. But ven it rains—zen it is tereeble…. Come,” she said brusquely, almost curtly, turning away from the grey prospect through the window, “let us seet here vere eet ees varm.” Still clasping her arms across her breast, she led them towards a coal fire which was crackling cheerfully in a hearth at one end of the great room; they seated themselves comfortably around the fire, La Marquise rang a bell, and spoke a few words to a butler, and presently he returned, bringing glasses and a decanter of old sherry on a tray.
They sat talking amiably then of many things. La Marquise questioned the boy about America, his stay in France, the places he had seen, referred regretfully again to the absence of her son and of the great friendship he cherished for America and Americans as a result of his travels there with Marshal Foch. And from time to time, the Countess, with a cunning that was comically naïve in its barefaced self-exposure, would prod him with a skinny finger, and whisper hoarsely:
