“You understand my anxieties while he is campaigning with the King.”

She had spoken in French and she had used the expression “mes transes” but for all the rest, intonation, bearing, solemnity, she might have been referring to one of the Bourbons.  I am sure that not a single one of them looked half as aristocratic as her son.

“I understand perfectly, Madame.  But then that life is so romantic.”

“Hundreds of young men belonging to a certain sphere are doing that,” she said very distinctly, “only their case is different.  They have their positions, their families to go back to; but we are different.  We are exiles, except of course for the ideals, the kindred spirit, the friendships of old standing we have in France.  Should my son come out unscathed he has no one but me and I have no one but him.  I have to think of his life.  Mr. Mills (what a distinguished mind that is!) has reassured me as to my son’s health.  But he sleeps very badly, doesn’t he?”

I murmured something affirmative in a doubtful tone 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.’”