Rachel Hasparren also understood the implication and flushed an even more vivid color than that habitually on her dark cheeks. She held out her hand, her kid-gloved hand, to Jeanne, with a defiant gesture of equality, "Good-by, Jeanne. I'm glad we had a glimpse of you." Jeanne took the hand awkwardly, with a sort of rancorous reluctance to have her grievance appeased, and turning back, shut the door behind her. "Now, Rachel!" expostulated her sister. Rachel breathed ragingly and stared at her sister in an old resentment, which the other took calmly, looking inside her card-case. Rachel advanced provocatively, "Did you hear what old Jeanne said, how the American lady would not put a dog to sleep in lodgings in which we French expect to house our servants?" The married sister resented this spiritedly. "Spoiling servants for the rest of us, that's what it is!" she said impatiently. "And what good does it do? You saw how old Jeanne only thinks the less of her for it. The more you try to do for that class, the less they think of you." "That's because Jeanne's whole nature has been degraded by our caste ideals!" shouted Rachel. "She's a poor, superstitious, medieval old thing, incapable of ordinary decent human relations. If she'd lived in America...!" Angele pulled the other bell-cord here with an air of cutting short another out-burst, and they both stood silently looking at the closed door, which presently was opened by little Isabelle. As they went down the stairs, Angele remarked, "Well, she seems to be all right. Like everybody else, as far as I can see. I expected to see her with a Liberty cap on her head and swinging a lighted bomb, to hear you going on." Rachel was taking off her kid gloves and putting on cotton ones. She said dreamily, her black eyes deep and glowing, "When I asked her how the peasants lived in America, she said ... the dear American ... 'there aren't any peasants in America.'" Her dark flushed face was shining as they came out on the rue Thiers and stood for an instant, glancing up at the battlemented walls of the dark old Castle. Rachel suddenly shook her fist at it, her cotton-gloved fist, and cried out, "You needn't glower down like that, you hideous old relic of an evil past! There's a great, wide, rich country across the seas, that never heard of such as you, that never had a feudal castle in it, that isn't darkened by a single hateful shadow such as you still throw down on us here." "Hush, Rachel," said her sister, patiently attempting to quiet her, "Anna Etchergary is looking out of the window at us." Rachel instantly lowered her voice, with an instinctive response of caution to this warning, but she was furious that she had done so. "That's Europe, that's Europe for you!" she said hotly, under her breath. "Spied upon every minute by suspicious, mean, malicious eyes." Angele broke in on her to say reasonably, "Well, anyhow, your hat is on one side again." CHAPTER IX