Kendall proffered a cigarette to Jacques, and then extended his case toward the young actors across the aisle. They were real American cigarettes, one of which will do more to carry you into the good graces of a _poilu_ than many bottles of _vin ordinaire_. Both young men came across, not too eagerly, and helped themselves. Monsieur Robert, the younger, and a very handsome, boyish, pleasing young man, seated himself in the chair the dressmaker’s companion had just vacated. He understood a word of English, but dared not venture an attempt to speak it; however, he was exceedingly cordial in French. Kendall managed to understand most that he said. It was a very laughable, but somewhat _risqué_, account of a conversation he had essayed with an Englishwoman during a recent engagement in London, carried on through the agency of a dictionary. Purely through accident the young man’s finger had pointed to a certain word when it should have been directed to quite another—with the result that he received a sound box on the ear. He told the thing with such boyish delight, and with such naïve joy in the outraged prudery of the Englishwoman, that Kendall laughed as he had laughed at nothing for months. This pleased the young actor. If Kendall had been diplomatically angling for Monsieur Robert’s friendship, he could not have contrived better. Suddenly he remembered Andree. “You must know a famous actor,” she had commanded him. Andree desired the good offices of an actor in her effort to enter the _Académie_—and this young gentleman had carried off the first prize in that national institution but a year before.... He regarded Monsieur Robert with new interest. While Kendall and Monsieur Robert made merry, if difficult, conversational progress, Bert was instructing Jacques in colloquial American in a manner to which his rather grotesque sense of humor was peculiarly adapted. “If you meet a lady,” he was saying, “and she bids you good afternoon, the thing to say, if you want to be really polite, is, ‘Go jump in the lake.’ Of course you don’t say this to a lady the first time you meet her, because it is rather friendly, but possibly the second time. Do you understand?” “But surely.... Go jump in the lake.... Ah, it has a sound, has it not? I like that.” He stood up, placed his hand on his heart and bowed to Bert profoundly. “Ah, madame,” he said, in honeyed tones, “you should go to jump in the lake.... Is it so you say it? It is a phrase. I shall remember it. And what does one say if—” Kendall lost the next lesson, for Monsieur Robert arose and shook hands warmly. “I hope you shall dine here often,” he said. “Me, I always dine here.... So we shall become better acquainted.”