And gradually by skill and patience she made him talk, made him give her back some of her confidences. It seemed to amuse her greatly that he should be a bookseller. She knew no booksellers in Paris; she could assure him they were all pure _bourgeois_, and there was not one of them that could be likened to Donatello's David. Manchester she had scarcely heard of; she shook her fair head over it. But when he told her of his French reading, when he waxed eloquent about Rousseau and George Sand, then her mirth became uncontrollable. 'You came to France to talk of Rousseau and George Sand?' she asked him with dancing eyes--'_Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!_ what do you take us for?' This time his vanity was hurt. He asked her to tell him what she meant--why she laughed at him. 'I will do better than that,' she said; 'I will get some friend of mine to take you to-morrow to "Les Trois Rats."' 'What is "Les Trois Rats"?' he asked, half wounded and half mystified. '"Les Trois Rats," Monsieur, is an artist's cafe. It is famous, it is characteristic; if you are in search of local colour you must certainly go there. When you come back you will have some fresh ideas, I promise you.' He asked if ladies also went there. 'Some do; I don't. Conventions mean nothing to me, as you perceive, or I should have a companion here to play propriety. But like you, perhaps, I am Romantic. I believe in the grand style. I have ideas as to how men should treat me. I can read Octave Feuillet. I have a terrible weakness for those _cavaliers_ of his. And garbage makes me ill. So I avoid the "Trois Rats."' She fell silent, resting her little chin on her hand. Then with a sudden sly smile she bent forward and looked him in the eyes. 'Are you pious, Monsieur, like all the English? There is some religion left in your country, isn't there?' 'Yes, certainly,' he admitted, 'there was a good deal.' Then, hesitating, he described his own early reading of Voltaire, watching its effect upon her, afraid lest here too he should say something fatuous, behind the time, as he seemed to have been doing all through. 'Voltaire!'--she shrugged her little shoulders--'Voltaire to me is just an old _perruque_--a prating philanthropical person who talked about _le bon Dieu_, and wrote just what every _bourgeois_ can understand. If he had had his will and swept away the clergy and the Church, how many fine subjects we artists should have lost!' He sat helplessly staring at her. She enjoyed his perplexity a minute; then she returned to the charge. 'Well, my credo is very short. Its first article is art--and its second is art--and its third is art!' Her words excited her. The delicate colour flushed into her cheek. She flung her head back and looked straight before her with half-shut eyes.