Archie was Anglo-Saxon enough to feel a slight stiffness at the first sitting, but Désirée was a stranger to the sensation of tied tongue. "I like the English," she announced. "Not many of them come here, but I have not spent my life in Draginoules, no, indeed! I was in a laundry once at La Madeleine. Do you know it? It is where they take in the washing of Nice. So I used to go much into Nice, and an English lady there painted me. She had a talent! She made me look beautiful. In Draginoules, do you know what they call me? They call me _l'Anglaise manquée_!" "Because you like the English so?" asked Archie. His French was considerably purer than hers, she spoke it with the Provençal accent that sounds exactly like a Cockney twang. "Because I have the nature, the habits of an English woman. Oh, I assure you! I like to live out of doors--to be out all day with one's bread and a bottle of wine and sleep on the hillside--that is what I call living. I always open my window at night, though my aunt says it is a folly. I could go to England if I chose, as a maid. My English lady would have me. Ah! how I long to see England. One gets so tired with Draginoules." "But your friends--you would be sorry to leave them?" "Oh, for that, I do not care about the people of Draginoules. It was my mother's place, not mine. I was born in Lyons, where my father was a silk-weaver. But he was a bad kind of man, so I came to my aunt to live. I do not think much of the people of Draginoules. They all like me, but I do not like them!" "Why don't you go to England, then? Though I think you are far better here!" quoth Archie, on whom the glamour of the place was strong. "My fiancé would kill himself," said Désirée serenely. "Oh--you are fiancée?" murmured Archie, wondering why he felt that absurd mingling of relief and regret. "To Auguste Colombini. He is a mechanician in Nice. We are to marry when he gets a rise. _Hélas! je ne serai plus fille!_" Her words, so simply and directly spoken, caught at Archie's imagination--"_Hélas! je ne serai plus fille!_" "What a _vierge farouche_!" he said to himself. "If I can get that feeling into my picture!" Aloud he said: "And your fiancé--he is very devoted, then?" "He adores me. It is a perfect folly, see you, to feel for anyone what he does for me. He is mad about me." She spoke with a calm arrogance that was very effective. How sure she was of her man! Was it a peculiarity of temperament in her or her fiancé that made such confidence possible? Archie flattered himself he was something of a student of human nature, and he absorbed all of Désirée that he could get in a spirit positively approaching that of the journalist. When a man and woman fall into the habit of discussing the intimate things, such as love and marriage; and, above all, of comparing the sexes; disaster, even if only a temporary one, is apt to follow. Archie returned to the themes next time she posed for him.