While she was changing a ten-franc piece from an immense pocket which swung from her side under her blue rep petticoat, she seemed suddenly to become aware of the noise within. She stepped to the door of the dining-room, listened a moment, and then opening it sharply, said, "Pere Felix, if you continue as you are doing, I shall ask you to leave my house!" "Pardon, Madame," said her husband instantly, rising to his feet and bowing, and the company, feeling themselves somehow vaguely in the wrong, rose to their feet and bowed also in the direction of the door at which appeared the heated face of Madame la Menagere. There was no doubt about it that Mere Felix intended to be both master and mistress in her own house, and behind her back the men rubbed their hands and thought how differently _they_ could manage a woman. We stepped outside into the clean well-aired vault of the twilight. The breeze was from the east, which in Provence of the South has not the terrors of our wind of that name, but is soft and perfumed with the early blossoms along the Gulf of Genoa. The Coast of Azure was sending us up an evening blessing. We strolled a long way in silence, taking the river road which leads towards Aramon. Then Cremieux broke the silence by asking me brusquely if I had known Rhoda Polly long. I did not think the question ought to have been asked in that tone, but he had done a good deal for me that day and I most certainly owed him a civil answer. "I have known Rhoda Polly," I said, "ever since I can remember. We used to fight in the garden for pig-nuts and in the woods for acorns. Rhoda Polly scratched my face with long sharp nails, and I thumped her back with little attention to chivalry. She could run faster than I, scratch more savagely, and when trapped she would sometimes bite like a little squirrel taken in the hand--yes, bite till the blood came." Gaston Cremieux listened with a rather forced smile upon his lips. "And the others--were they present? Were you two allowed to run about the woods all by yourselves?" You can change anything about a Frenchman except his idea concerning the co-education of the sexes. Here the anarchist is at one with Monsieur the Count de Mun, and Monsieur Jean Jaures with the Archbishop of Paris. The convent rule, whether applied by lay mistress or sister of the Sacre Coeur, constant supervision, a fiction of ignorance of things of the commonest knowledge, the girl never to be out of sight of her mother or aunt till the day she is delivered to her husband--these are what the heart of every Frenchman believes to be the only path which the girls he would marry should be allowed to tread. He may praise English and American methods, allow the charm of the result, but in his heart he prefers for himself his "snow-white gosling." "Tell me about the college to which Rhoda Polly went," he continued, putting aside the early fightings and scratchings as too unsatisfactory for comment.