nsolence to the pretty caissiere of
the Cafe de l'Ecole. That it should have been offered in her husband's
presence was a gratuitous aggravation of the offence. That it should
have been offered her with such disdainful contempt for any objection on
her part or her husband's, with such easy assurance that there could be
no objections on their part, was another gratuitous aggravation of the
offence. In that noble insolence Calvert read a sign of the times more
legible than the clearest writing in the pamphlets flooding the
book-stalls of the Palais Royal.

CHAPTER V

THE PRIVATE SECRETARY

They drove in silence almost to the rue Neuve de Berry, Calvert musing
on the strange glimpse he had had of life in Paris, Beaufort busy with
his restless horses. At the grille of the Legation Calvert alighted and
Beaufort bade him good-by, still with the gloomy, foreboding look on his
handsome face.

When Calvert had mounted the great stairway, with the carved salamanders
on the balustrade ever crawling their way up and down, he found Mr.
Jefferson sitting alone before the bright fire in his library. As soon
as he heard the young man's step he looked up eagerly.

"At last!" he cried. "I was wishing that you would come in. Mr. Morris
has just been despatched in my carriage to the rue Richelieu, and I was
beginning to wonder what that wild Beaufort had done with you to keep
you so late."

"We are but just returned from a sight of the Palais Royal," said
Calvert, throwing off his great-coat and sitting down beside Mr.
Jefferson, who rang for candles and a box of his Virginia tobacco. "And
a strange enough sight it was--a turbulent crowd, and much political
speaking from hoarse-throated giants held aloft on their friends'
shoulders." "A strange enough place, indeed," said Mr. Jefferson,
shaking his head and smiling a little at Calvert's wholesale description
of it. "'Tis the political centre of Paris, in fact, and though the
crowds may be turbulent and the orators windy, yet 'tis there that the
fruitful seed of the political harvest, which this great country will
reap with such profit, is being sown. 'Despise not the day of small
things,'" he went on, cheerfully. "These rude, vehement orators, with
their narrow, often erroneous, ideas, are nevertheless doing a good
work. They are opening the minds of the ignorant, clearing a way for
broader, higher ideals to lodge therein; they are the pioneers, in this
hitherto undiscovere