“If she did know,” I said, with a fervor which was lost upon him, “believe this, whether you can understand it or not:  she was not a typical American girl.”

I had, as usual, many more words which he deserved to have had said to him, but education along this line takes too much time.  I ought to have begun this great work with his great-grandparents.

* * * * *

What any one can see about Dinard to like is a mystery to me!  Is it possible that one who has spent a month there could ever be lured back again?  There is a beautiful journey from Paris across France southwesterly to the coast, through odd little French villages, vineyards, poppy-fields, and rose-gardens, across shining rivulets and through an undulating landscape, all so lovely that it is no wonder that one expects all this beauty to lead up to a climax.  But what a disappointment Dinard is to one’s enthusiastic anticipations!  This famous watering-place has to my mind not one solitary redeeming feature.  It has no excuse for being famous.  It has not even one happy accident about it as a peg to hang its fame upon, like some writers’ first novels.  Dinard simply goes on being famous, nobody knows why.  And to go there, after reading pages about it in the papers and hearing people speak of Dinard as Mohammedans whisper sacredly of Mecca, is like meeting celebrities.  You wonder what under the sun—­what in the world—­how in the name of Heaven such ugly, stupid, uninteresting, heavy, dull, and insufferably ordinary persons are allowed to become famous by an overruling and beneficent Providence!  I have met many celebrities, and I have been to Dinard.  I have had my share of disappointments.

To begin with, Dinard is not sufficiently picturesque.  There are but one or two pretty vistas and three or four points of view.  Then it is not typically French.  It is inhabited partly by English families who cross the Channel yearly from Southampton and Portsmouth, and who take with them their nine uninteresting daughters, with long front teeth and ill-hanging duck skirts, and partly by Americans who go to Dinard as they go to the Eiffel Tower; not that either is particularly interesting, but they had heard of these places before they came over.  The only really interesting thing within five miles of Dinard is that, off St. Malo, on the island of Grand Be, Chateaubriand is buried.  But as this really belongs more to the attractions of St. Malo than to Dinard, and nobody who spends summers at Dinard ever mentioned Chateaubriand in my presence, or honored his tomb by a visit, it is pure charity on my part to ascribe this solitary point of real interest to Dinard.  For, after all, Chateaubriand does not belong to it.  Which logic reminds me forcibly of the plea entered by the defence in a suit for borrowing a kettle:  “In the first place, I never borrowed his kettle; in the second place, it was whole when I returned it; and, in the third place, it was cracked when I got it.”