Margot smiled; she could forgive the patriotic denial, but she was aware that she knew better. “All the same,” she said, “it must be sad to live in a perpetual fog and never to see the sun. For that I could never support your England, notwithstanding all that you have there. Of what use is wealth when you cannot see the sky?” said Margot. Helen was too indignant to reply. But in the course of the first day she got a great deal of information from Margot, who told her all about the young ladies at the _château_, who talked English _comme deux diablesses_, the woman said--and who were indeed English-mad, and betrothed, one of them, to an Englishman. When Helen asked once more in her halting French, whether they were _très-agréables_, meaning “very nice,” Margot answered with a shrug of her shoulders-- “I do not know anything to the contrary. What does that matter to us others if the aristocrats are _agréable_ or not? They are not as we are, they are not of us. They have got their _château_ and their _bois_, and all that, though many people think they have no right, and should not be allowed to retain it. But I say to my man, ‘What is that to us? We have not the money to buy it. Let them stay. Madame la Comtesse is better than old Père Goudron, who would buy it all if it were taken away from them. So why should we interfere?’ That is what I always say----” “Interfere!” said Helen, not knowing what to think. “Jacques, who is my man, is not always of my opinion, mademoiselle. He says, why should there be a _château_ for one and a little cabin for another? But I say, ‘Hold thy tongue, _mon homme_. How would it advantage thee?’ It is hard, nevertheless,” said Margot, “that we should have to go and buy our own woods to warm us in the winter. The trees were not made by M. le Comte; they are there for all the world. Yet we must spend our little money, and go to the _vente_, and pay for what has grown out of the earth! This is an injustice. When anything passes through a _fabrique_, and is manufactured, I allow that it should be paid for; but that which grows by itself, which comes out of the ground, that is different. Figure to yourself that I am talking politics to the English young lady. _Va_, Margot, thou art a fool for thy pains! Naturally mademoiselle is Conservative--she loves the aristocrats, like all her nation?” “I don’t know,” said Helen, surprised. She had heard her father rail against aristocrats, but she had understood that it was because the great people round Fareham had been uncivil. She had never supposed the existence of such a feeling in a cottage, and it puzzled her too much to make any reply possible. “But surely----” she began, then stopped, for she was not very sure of anything in French, and even in English could not venture upon a political argument. She returned with some difficulty and discomfort to the original question. “The young ladies at the _château_, are they not good to the poor?”