“Disgusting!  Can we never stop their coming to France?”

I asked, smiling: 

“What have you got against them?  As far as I am concerned, they don’t worry me.”

He snapped out: 

“Of course they don’t worry you!  But I married one of them.”

I stopped and laughed at him.

“Go ahead and tell me about it.  Does she make you very unhappy?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“No, not exactly.”

“Then she—­is not true to you?”

“Unfortunately, she is.  That would be cause for a divorce, and I could get rid of her.”

“Then I’m afraid I don’t understand!”

“You don’t understand?  I’m not surprised.  Well, she simply learned how to speak French—­that’s all!  Listen.

“I didn’t have the least desire of getting married when I went to spend the summer at Etretat two years ago.  There is nothing more dangerous than watering-places.  You have no idea how it suits young girls.  Paris is the place for women and the country for young girls.

“Donkey rides, surf-bathing, breakfast on the grass, all these things are traps set for the marriageable man.  And, really, there is nothing prettier than a child about eighteen, running through a field or picking flowers along the road.

“I made the acquaintance of an English family who were stopping at the same hotel where I was.  The father looked like those men you see over there, and the mother was like all other Englishwomen.

“They had two sons, the kind of boys who play rough games with balls, bats or rackets from morning till night; then came two daughters, the elder a dry, shrivelled-up Englishwoman, the younger a dream of beauty, a heavenly blonde.  When those chits make up their minds to be pretty, they are divine.  This one had blue eyes, the kind of blue which seems to contain all the poetry, all the dreams, all the hopes and happiness of the world!

“What an infinity of dreams is caused by two such eyes!  How well they answer the dim, eternal question of our heart!

“It must not be forgotten either that we Frenchmen adore foreign women.  As soon as we meet a Russian, an Italian, a Swede, a Spaniard, or an Englishwoman with a pretty face, we immediately fall in love with her.  We enthuse over everything which comes from outside—­clothes, hats, gloves, guns and—­women.  But what a blunder!

“I believe that that which pleases us in foreign women is their accent.  As soon as a woman speaks our language badly we think she is charming, if she uses the wrong word she is exquisite and if she jabbers in an entirely unintelligible jargon, she becomes irresistible.

“My little English girl, Kate, spoke a language to be marvelled at.  At the beginning I could understand nothing, she invented so many new words; then I fell absolutely in love with this queer, amusing dialect.  All maimed, strange, ridiculous terms became delightful in her mouth.  Every evening, on the terrace of the Casino, we had long conversations which resembled spoken enigmas.