had gone that in that class of life in France they never shook hands with a lady, and that the poor man was very much embarrassed.  He was very useful to W. as a political agent, as he was kind to the poor people and took small (or no) fees.  They all loved him, and talked to him quite freely.  His women-kind were very shy and provincial.  I think our visits were a great trial to them.  They always returned them most punctiliously, and came in all their best clothes.  When we went to see them we generally found them in short black skirts, and when they were no longer very young, with black caps, but they always had handsome silk dresses, velvet cloaks, and hats with flowers and feathers when they came to see us.  Some of them took the cup of tea we offered, but they didn’t know what to do with it, and sat on the edge of their chairs, looking quite miserable until we relieved them of the burden of the tea-cup.  Mme. A. was rather against the tea-table; she preferred the old-fashioned tray handed around with wine and cakes, but I persuaded her to try, and after a little while she acknowledged that it was better to have the tea-table brought in.  It made a diversion; I got up to make the tea.  Someone gave me a chair, someone else handed the cups.  It made a little movement, and was not so stiff as when we all sat for over an hour on the same chairs making conversation.  It is terrible to have to make conversation, and extraordinary how little one finds to say.  We had always talked easily enough at home, but then things came more naturally, and even the violent family discussions were amusing, but my recollection of these French provincial visits is something awful.  Everybody so polite, so stiff, and the long pauses when nobody seemed to have anything to say.  I of course was a novelty and a foreign element—­they didn’t quite know what to do with me.  Even to Mme. A., and I grew very fond of her, and she was invariably charming to me, I was something different.  We had many talks on every possible subject during our long drives, and also in the winter afternoons.  At first I had my tea always upstairs in my own little salon, which I loved with the curtains drawn, a bright wood-fire burning, and all my books about; but when I found that she sat alone in the big drawing-room, not able to occupy herself in any way, I asked her if I might order my tea there, and there were very few afternoons that I didn’t sit with her when I was at home.  She talked often about her early married life—­winters in Cannes and in Paris, where they received a great deal, principally Protestants, and I fancy she sometimes regretted the interchange of ideas and the brilliant conversation she had been accustomed to, but she never said it.  She was never tired of hearing about my early days in America—­our family life—­the extraordinary liberty of the young people, etc.  We often talked over the religious question, and though we were both Protestants, we were as far apart almost