ersuasion and encouraging the tasters to take a chance.
She certainly had discovered some entirely new flavours that the best
chemists hadn't stumbled on. She was proud of this, but a heap prouder
of her French flying man. When she wasn't thinking up new infamies with
rutabagas and watermelon rinds, she'd be showing him off to the fair
crowds. She give the impression when she paraded him that the French Army
would of had few flyers if she hadn't stepped into the breach.

And mebbe she wasn't desperate with fear that some of the Red Gap society
buds and matrons would want to stick in with nursing and attentions for
the interesting invalid! Nothing like that with Genevieve May! She kept
closer guard on that man than he would of got in the worst German prison
camp. About the only other person in town she'd trust him to was Cousin
Egbert Floud.

Cousin Egbert liked the Frenchman a lot at first, and rode him round town
to see the canning factory and the new waterworks and the Chamber of
Commerce, and Price's Addition to Red Gap, and so on. Also, he'd drag him
all over the fair grounds to look at prize bulls and windmills and patent
silos.

Cousin Egbert had refused from the first to taste any of Genevieve May's
deviltry with the vegetable kingdom. He swore he was on a diet and the
doctor wouldn't answer for his life if he even tasted anything outside.
He was telling me that last day of the fair that the woman ought to be
arrested for carrying on so, Genevieve May being now busy with some
highly artificial ketchup made of carrots, and something else
unimportant, with pure vegetable dyes.

"Yes; and she just tried to hand me that same old stuff about what her
Japanese maid calls her," he says to me at this time. "She says I could
never guess what that funny little mite calls her. And I says no, I never
could of guessed it if she hadn't already told me; but I says I know it
is Madam Peach Blossom, and that Jap maid sure is one funny little mite,
thinking up a thing like that, the Japanese being a serious race and
not given to saying laughable things."

That's Cousin Egbert all over. He ain't a bit like one of them courters
of the old French courts that you read about in the Famous Crimes of
History.

"Madam Peach Blossom!" he says, snickering bitterly. "Say, ain't them
Japs got a great sense of humour! I bet what she meant was Madam Lemon
Blossom!"

Anyway, Genevieve May trusted her flying man to this here brutal cynic