So exclaimed the dowager, who carried in her memory the picture of the streets of Paris when neither women nor children were spared by the bullets and sabres of his slaughterers--the hyena to whom the clergy so bowed down that not a mass for the dead patriots could be secured in Paris, from either priest or archbishop, and the Republicans piled in the streets by hundreds! Mrs. McVeigh turned in some dismay to the Countess Helene. The people of the Western world, the women in particular, knew little of the bitter spirit permeating the politics of France. The United States had very knotty problems of her own to discuss in 1859. "Tah!" continued the dowager, "I startle you! Well, well--it profits nothing to recite these ills. Many a man, and woman, too, has been put to death for saying less;--and the exile of my son to remember--yes; all that! He was Republican--I a Legitimist; I of the old, he of the new. Republics are good in theory; France might have given it a longer trial but for this trickster politician, who is called Emperor--by the grace of God!" "Do they add 'Defender of the Faith' as our cautious English neighbors persist in doing?" asked the girlish Marquise with a smile. "Your country, Madame McVeigh, has no such cant in its constitution. You have reason to be proud of the great men, the wise, far-seeing men, who framed those laws." Mrs. McVeigh smiled and sighed in self-pity. "How frivolous American women will appear to you, Madame! Few of us ever read the constitution of our country. I confess I only know the first line:--'When in the course of human events it becomes necessary,' but what they thought necessary to do is very vague in my mind." Then, catching the glance of the Marquise bright with laughter, she laughed also without knowing well at what. "Well; what is it?" "Only that you are quoting from the Declaration of Independence, and fancy it the constitution." "That is characteristic of American women, too," laughed Mrs. McVeigh; "declarations of independence is one of our creeds. But I shall certainly be afraid of you, Marquise. At your age the learning and comparing of musty laws would have been dull work for me. It is the age for dancing and gay carelessness." The Marquise smiled assent with her curious, dark eyes, in which amber lights shown. She had a certain appealing meekness at times--a sweet deference that was a marked contrast to the aggressiveness with which she had met Dumaresque in the morning. The Countess Helene, observing the deprecating manner with which she received the implied praise for erudition, found herself watching with a keener interest the girl who had seemed to her a mere pretty book-worm. "She is more than that," thought the astute worldling. "Alain's widow has a face for tragedy, the address of an ingenue, and the _tout en semble_ of a coquette." The dowager smiled at Mrs. McVeigh's remarks.