and she remarked
quaintly, with a certain curtness, "It's so unnecessary, this worry! The
unfortunate position of an exile has its advantages. At a certain height
of social position (wealth has got nothing to do with it, we have been
ruined in a most righteous cause), at a certain established height one
can disregard narrow prejudices. You see examples in the aristocracies
of all the countries. A chivalrous young American may offer his life for
a remote ideal which yet may belong to his familial tradition. We, in
our great country, have every sort of tradition. But a young man of good
connections and distinguished relations must settle down some day,
dispose of his life."

"No doubt, Madame," I said, raising my eyes to the figure
outside--"_Americain_, _Catholique et gentilhomme_"--walking up and down
the path with a cigar which he was not smoking. "For myself, I don't
know anything about those necessities. I have broken away for ever from
those things."

"Yes, Mr. Mills talked to me about you. What a golden heart that is.
His sympathies are infinite."

I thought suddenly of Mills pronouncing on Mme. Blunt, whatever his text
on me might have been: "She lives by her wits." Was she exercising her
wits on me for some purpose of her own? And I observed coldly:

"I really know your son so very little."

"Oh, _voyons_," she protested. "I am aware that you are very much
younger, but the similitudes of opinions, origins and perhaps at bottom,
faintly, of character, of chivalrous devotion--no, you must be able to
understand him in a measure. He is infinitely scrupulous and recklessly
brave."

I listened deferentially to the end yet with every nerve in my body
tingling in hostile response to the Blunt vibration, which seemed to have
got into my very hair.

"I am convinced of it, Madame. I have even heard of your son's bravery.
It's extremely natural in a man who, in his own words, 'lives by his
sword.'"

She suddenly departed from her almost inhuman perfection, betrayed
"nerves" like a common mortal, of course very slightly, but in her it
meant more than a blaze of fury from a vessel of inferior clay. Her
admirable little foot, marvellously shod in a black shoe, tapped the
floor irritably. But even in that display there was something
exquisitely delicate. The very anger in her voice was silvery, as it
were, and more like the petulance of a seventeen-year-old beauty.

"What nonsense! A Blunt doesn't h