of a _chasseur_ in the Marseilles
cafe, he had acquired a peculiarly imaginative reverence for English
girls. The reverence, indeed, extended to English ladies generally.
Owing to the queer circumstances of his life they were the only women
of a class above his own, with whom he had associated on terms of
equality. He had, then, no dishonorable designs as regards Miss Betty
Errington. On the other hand, the thoughts of marriage had as yet not
entered his head. You see, a Frenchman and an Englishman or an
American, view marriage from entirely different angles. The
Anglo-Saxon of honest instincts, attracted towards a pretty girl at
once thinks of the possibilities of marriage; if he finds them
infinitely remote, he makes romantic love to her in the solitude of
his walks abroad or of his sleepless nights, and, in her presence, is
as dumb and dismal as a freshly hooked trout. The equally honest Gaul
does nothing of the kind. The attraction in itself is a stimulus to
adventure. He makes love to her, just because it is the nature of a
lusty son of Adam to make love to a pretty daughter of Eve. He lives
in the present. The rest doesn't matter. He leaves it to chance. I am
speaking, be it understood, not of deep passions--that is a different
matter altogether--but of the more superficial sexual attractions
which we, as a race, take so seriously and puritanically, often to our
most disastrous undoing, and which the Latin light-heartedly regards
as essential, but transient phenomena of human existence. Aristide
made the most respectful love in the world to Betty Errington, because
he could not help himself. "_Tonnerre de Dieu!_" he cried when from my
Britannic point of view, I talked to him on the subject. "You English
whom I try to understand and can never understand are so funny! It
would have been insulting to Miss Betty Errington--_tiens!_--a purple
hyacinth of spring--that was what she was--not to have made love to
her. Love to a pretty woman is like a shower of rain to hyacinths. It
passes, it goes. Another one comes. _Qu'importe?_ But the shower is
necessary--Ah! _sacre gredin_, when will you comprehend?"

All this to make as clear as an Englishman, in the confidence of a
changeling child of Provence can hope to do, the attitude of Aristide
Pujol towards the sweet and innocent Betty Errington with her mouth like
crumpled rose-petals, her ivory and peach-blossom complexion, her soft
contralto voice, et cetera, et cetera, e