“Ah, glory, of course!” repeated Jacqueline.  “I understand how much that counts, but there is glory of various kinds, and I know the kind that I prefer,” she added in a tone which seemed to imply that it was not that of arms, or of perilous navigation.  “We all know,” she went on, “that not every man can have genius, but any sailor who has good luck can get to be an admiral.”

“Let us hope you will be one soon, Monsieur Fred,” said Dolly.  “You will have well deserved it, according to the way you have distinguished yourself on board the ‘Borda.’”

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.”