One funny thing about this conversation was that every few minutes he turned to his tall companion and explained to him in French what we were talking about, and I thought it so sweet.

Finally I asked the tall boy—­he was a corporal and had been watching his English-speaking chum with such admiration—­what he did in civil life.

He turned his big brown eyes, on me, and replied:  “I, madame?  I never had any civil life.”

I looked puzzled, and he added:  “I come of a military family.  I am an orphan, and I am an enfant de troupe.”

Now did you know that there were such things today as “Children of the Regiment”?  I own I did not.  Yet there he stood before me, a smiling twenty-year old corporal, who had been brought up by the regiment, been a soldier boy from his babyhood.

In the meantime they had decided what they wanted for books.  The English-speaking French lad wanted either Shakespeare or Milton, and as I laid the books on the table for him, he told his comrade who the two authors were, and promised to explain it all to him, and there wasn’t a sign of show-off in it either.  As for the Child of the Regiment, he wanted a Balzac, and when I showed him where they were, he picked out “Eugenie Grandet,” and they both went away happy.

I don’t need to tell you that when the news spread that there were books in the house on the hilltop that could be borrowed for the asking, I had a stream of visitors, and one of these visits was a very different matter.

One afternoon I was sitting before the fire.  It was getting towards dusk.  There was a knock at the door.  I opened it.  There stood a handsome soldier, with a corporal’s stripes on his sleeve.  He saluted me with a smile, as he told me that his comrades had told him that there was an American lady here who did not seem to be bored if the soldiers called on her.

“Alors,” he added, “I have come to make you a visit.”

I asked him in.

He accepted the invitation.  He thrust his fatigue cap into his pocket, took off his topcoat, threw it on the back of a chair, which he drew up to the fire, beside mine, and at a gesture from me he sat down.

“Hmmm,” I thought.  “This is a new proposition.”

The other soldiers never sit down even when invited.  They prefer to keep on their feet.

Ever since I began to see so much of the army, I have asked myself more than once, “Where are the fils de famille”?  They can’t all be officers, or all in the heavy artillery, or all in the cavalry.  But I had never seen one, to know him, in the infantry.  This man was in every way a new experience, even among the noncommissioned officers I had seen.  He was more at his ease.  He stayed nearly two hours.  We talked politics, art, literature, even religion—­he was a good Catholic—­ just as one talks at a tea-party when one finds a man who is cultivated, and can talk, and he was evidently cultivated, and he talked awfully well.