“Unless I help her!  My good fellow, you don’t know what you’re saying.  Do you know that she refused—­refused violently—­to help me?”

He shook his head, his blue eyes betraying some incredulity.

“Well, then, I’ll tell you.  It’ll show you.  You’ll be able to go away again with a clear conscience, knowing you’ve done your best and failed.  Sit down.”

As she showed no intention of taking a seat herself, he remained standing.

“She refused the Duc de Berteuil.”  She made the statement with head erect and hands flung apart.  “I suppose you have no idea of what that meant to me?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t.”

“Of course you haven’t.  I don’t know an American who would have.  You’re so engrossed in your own small concerns.  None of you have any conception of the things that really matter—­the higher things.  Well, then, let me tell you.  The Duc de Berteuil is—­or rather was—­the greatest parti in France.  He isn’t any more, because they’ve married him to a rich girl from South America or one of those places—­brown as a berry—­with a bust—­” She rounded her arms to give an idea of the bust.  “Mais, n’importe.  My niece refused him.  That meant—­I’ve never confessed it to any one before—­I’ve been too proud—­but I want you to understand—­it meant my defeat—­my final defeat.  I hadn’t the courage to begin again.  C’etait le desastre.  C’etait Sedan.”

“Oh, madame!”

It seemed to him that her mouth worked with an odd piteousness; and before going on she put up a crooked little jeweled hand and dashed away a tear.

“It would have been everything to me.  It would have put me where I belong, in the place I’ve been trying to reach all these years.  The life of an American woman in Europe, monsieur, can be very cruel.  We’ve nothing to back us up, and everything to fight against in front.  It’s all push, and little headway.  They don’t want us.  That’s the plain English of it.  They can’t imagine why we leave our own country and come over here.  They’re so narrow.  They’re selfish, too.  Everything they’ve got they want to keep for themselves.  They marry us—­the Lord only knows why!—­and nine times out of ten all we get for it is the knowledge that we’ve been bamboozled out of our own dots.  There was Rene de Lonchartres who married that goose Annie Armstrong.  They ridiculed her when she came over here, and at the same time clapped him on the back for having got her.  That’s as true as you live.  It’s their way.  They would have ridiculed me, too, if I hadn’t been determined years ago to beat them on their own ground.  I could have done it, too, if—­”

“If it had been worth while,” he ventured.

“You know nothing about it.  I could have done it if my niece had put out just one little finger—­when I’d got everything ready for her to do it.  Yes, I’d got everything ready—­and yet she refused him.  She refused him after I’d seen them all—­his mother, his sisters, his two uncles—­one of them in waiting on the Duc d’Orleans—­Philippe V., as we call him—­all of them the purest old noblesse d’epee in Normandy.”