for that, and yet she was too rigid for anything else; and the sight of such dismal perversions made me hate more than ever the stupid terms on which nations have organised their intercourse. When she gathered that one of my guests was simply cramming it down the throat of another that the English literary mind was not even literary, she turned away with a vague shrug and a pitiful look at her daughter for the taste of people who took their pleasure so poorly: the truth in question would be so obvious that it was not worth making a scene about. Madame de Brindes evidently looked at any scene between the English and the Americans as a quarrel proceeding vaguely from below stairs--a squabble sordidly domestic. Her almost immediate departure with her daughter operated as a lucky interruption, and I caught for the first time in the straight, spare girl, as she followed her mother, a little of the air that Vendemer had told me he found in her, the still exaltation, the brown uplifted head that we attribute, or that at any rate he made it visible to me that he attributed, to the dedicated Maid. He considered that his intended bore a striking resemblance to Jeanne d'Arc, and he marched after her on this occasion like a square-shouldered armour-bearer. He reappeared, however, after he had put the ladies into a cab, and half an hour later the rest of my friends, with the sole exception of Bonus, having dispersed, he was sitting up with me in the empty studio for another _bout de causerie_. At first perhaps I was too occupied with reprimanding my compatriot to give much attention to what Vendemer might have to say; I remember at any rate that I had asked Bonus what had induced him to make so grave a blunder. He was not even yet, it appeared, aware of his blunder, so that I had to inquire by what odd chance he had taken Heidenmauer for a bigoted Briton. "If I spoke to him as one he answered as one; that's bigoted enough," said Alfred Bonus. "He was confused and amused at your onslaught: he wondered what fly had stung you." "The fly of patriotism," Vendemer suggested. "Do _you_ like him--a beast of a German?" Bonus demanded. "If he's an Englishman he isn't a German--_il faut opter_. We can hang him for the one or for the other, we can't hang him for both. I was immensely struck with those things he played." "They had no charm for me, or doubtless I too should have been demoralised," Alfred said. "He seemed to know nothing about Miss Brownrigg. Now Miss Brownrigg's great." "I like the things and even the people you quarrel about, you big babies of the same breast. _C'est à se tordre!_" Vendemer declared. "I may be very abject, but I _do_ take an interest in the American novel," Alfred rejoined. "I hate such expressions: there's no such thing as the American novel." "Is there by chance any such thing as the French?"