“Oh, it’s you, is it?” he said; “I told the landlady to send you up. If you don’t do the things better I must get some other woman. I believe you purposely wear holes in my underclothing.”
“Indeed, Monsieur,” came the reply in French, “I am most anxious to wash your dirty linen, but, Monsieur Gerard, you give your family almost too much of it.”
“By Jove!” replied Gerard. “I say, Mademoiselle, wait a minute till I--” He disappeared.
Mademoiselle Papotier smiled a supercilious smile. “Ah, que les hommes sont plaisants,” she murmured. “Mauvais plaisants!” she added. But when Gerard returned a few moments later she was boldly agreeable to him, with a smirk round her slightly mustachioed lips.
“To what am I indebted?” began the young officer.
She waved a little deprecatory hand in the neatest of gray gloves.
“A moment!” she said. “Can you not spare me a moment? I am fatigued. May I not repose myself?”
Gerard, ashamed and awkward, hurriedly pushed forward an arm-chair.
“Ah, but sit you down also,” she expostulated. “Only the disagreeable says itself standing.” Then, as he obeyed, she looked at him with an ogle. “What a handsome man you are!” she said. The words frightened Gerard excessively but unnecessarily; it was only part of Mademoiselle Papotier’s philosophy that you could put _every_ man on earth into a good-humor by broadly praising his looks. If Red Riding-hood had said to the wolf “What fine teeth you have!” instead of “What big ones!” he would probably have abandoned his intention of eating her.
“No wonder the poor thing loved you,” immediately added the little governess, casting down her eyes. She was hung round with black jet indiscriminately, and she picked at it--now here, now there.
Gerard, as we know, was not a diplomatist. “Did _she_ ask you to come and tell me that?” he cried, with irritable irony.
“Ah, Monsieur van Helmont,” replied the Frenchwoman, softly, and her swarthy face seemed to lose its vigor, “it is always like that; you men, you knock at a woman’s heart until it opens, and then you cry out in scorn at the open door!” She hesitated for a moment, still plucking at the jet. “First the beautiful Ursula,” she said, “and then my own sweet Helena. Aye, Monsieur, it is not right!”