This induced Fred to let them understand something of life on board the practice-ship; he told how the masters who resided on shore ascended by a ladder to the gun-deck, which had been turned into a schoolroom; how six cadets occupied the space intended for each gun-carriage, where hammocks hung from hooks served them instead of beds; how the chapel was in a closet opened only on Sundays.  He described the gymnastic feats in the rigging, the practice in gunnery, and many other things which, had they been well described, would have been interesting; but Fred was only a poor narrator.  The conclusion the young ladies seemed to reach unanimously after hearing his descriptions, was discouraging.  They cried almost with one voice—­

“Think of any woman being willing to marry a sailor.”

“Why not?” asked Giselle, very promptly.

“Because, what’s the use of a husband who is always out of your reach, as it were, between water and sky?  One would better be a widow.  Widows, at any rate, can marry again.  But you, Giselle, don’t understand these things.  You are going to be a nun.”

“Had I been in your place, Fred,” said Isabelle Ray, “I should rather have gone into the cavalry school at Saint Cyr.  I should have wanted to be a good huntsman, had I been a man, and they say naval officers are never good horsemen.”

Poor Fred!  He was not making much progress among the young girls.  Almost everything people talked about outside his cadet life was unknown to him; what he could talk about seemed to have no interest for any one, unless indeed it might interest Giselle, who was an adept in the art of sympathetic listening, never having herself anything to say.

Besides this, Fred was by no means at his ease in talking to Jacqueline.  They had been told not to ‘tutoyer’ each other, because they were getting too old for such familiarity, and it was he, and not she, who remembered this prohibition.  Jacqueline perceived this after a while, and burst out laughing: 

“Tiens!  You call me ‘you,"’ she cried, “and I ought not to say ‘thou’ but ‘you.’  I forgot.  It seems so odd, when we have always been accustomed to ‘tutoyer’ each other.”

“One ought to give it up after one’s first communion,” said the eldest Mademoiselle Wermant, sententiously.  “We ceased to ‘tutoyer’ our boy cousins after that.  I am told nothing annoys a husband so much as to see these little familiarities between his wife and her cousins or her playmates.”

Giselle looked very much astonished at this speech, and her air of disapproval amused Belle and Yvonne exceedingly.  They began presently to talk of the classes in which they were considered brilliant pupils, and of their success in compositions.  They said that sometimes very difficult subjects were given out.  A week or two before, each had had to compose a letter purporting to be from Dante in exile to a friend in Florence, describing Paris as it was in his time, especially the manners and customs of its universities, ending by some allusion to the state of matters between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.