"
"Not foreign," she repeated gravely. She was silent a
while. "I have thought much of it all lately," she said
at last. "It will be wholesome for Jacques on your farm.
Horses--dogs---- Your mother will love him. She can't
help it. She--I acted like a beast to that woman,
George. I'll say that. She hit me hard. But she has
good traits. She is not unlike my own mother."
George said nothing. God forbid that he should tell her,
even by a look, that she and her mother were of a caste
different from his own.
But he was bored to the soul by the difference; he was
tired of her ignorances, which she showed every minute,
of her ghastly, unclean knowledges--which she never
showed.
They came into the courtyard of the Chateau de la Motte,
the ancient castle of the Breton dukes, which is now an
inn. The red sunset flamed up behind the sad little town
and its gray old houses and spires massed on the hill,
and the black river creeping by. George's eyes kindled
at the sombre picture.
"In this very court," he said, "Constance stood when she
summoned the States of Brittany to save her boy Arthur
from King John."
"Oh, yes, you have read of it to me in your Shakespeare.
It is one of his unpleasant stories. Come, Bebe. It
grows damp."
As she climbed the stone stairway with the child, Colette
lingered to gossip with the portier. "Poor lady! You
will adore her! She is one of us. But she makes of that
bete Anglais and the ugly child, saints and gods!"
When George presently came up to their bare little room,
Lisa was singing softly, as she rocked Jacques to sleep.
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