To while away the slow-moving hours, and perchance close their senses to the external uproar, the lovers talked, or, rather, Nancy talked and Power listened. A casual reference to some such wild night in France led the girl to discourse of her Parisian friends, and she gave full play to a ready wit and gift of close yet kindly and humorous observation which, in different conditions, would certainly have won her a place among contemporary writers on French life and manners. American ways and habits of thought owe so much to the Gallic leaven introduced at the beginning of the eighteenth century that a modern American woman assimilates French ideas with more ease and surer touch than her British sister; so Nancy would have brought to the task both racial sympathy and natural equipment. She knew Daudet and Turgenieff--had been present at one of their famous quarrels--and her description of the Russian's unbridled fury and the Frenchman's ironic good temper caused the scene to live again. She spoke French fluently, had even gleaned some scraps of Russian, and Power found himself transported in imagination to the brilliant salons where litterateurs like Zola and Coppée bickered, where artists like Rodin and Bonnat founded schools, where Massenet played snatches of operas yet to reach the ear of a wider world, where the men and women who occupied the stage in the Dreyfus drama were already stabbing reputations with poison-tipped epigrams.
Often she brought laughter to his lips; as, for instance, when she spoke of the beautiful and fascinating wife of a struggling artist, a lady notorious in many walks of life, who attended a fancy-dress ball at the American Embassy. "Ah," said someone to the Duchesse de Brasnes, "here comes the latest star, gotten up appropriately as Madame Récamier!" "No," chirped the witty old lady instantly. "You have given her the wrong name. You mean Madame Réclâmier!"
Luckily, Power's acquaintance with the French language was close enough to enable him to appreciate the caustic humor of the words. He was far too absorbed then in the girl's vivid impressions of personalities familiar to him only in the columns of newspapers to indulge in speculation as to the why and the wherefore of this flow of anecdote and quaintly analytical glimpses of character. But he understood later. During three long years she had existed in an atmosphere that checked every natural impulse. She had become a statue, beautiful but impassive. Now she was once more a woman. The marble was coming to life. Love had breathed on her, and the red blood was flowing freely in her veins.