“Good!” said Whitwell.  “That suits me.  And about Paris, now.  Paris strike you the same way?”

“It don’t need to,” said Jeff.  “That’s a place where I’d like to live.  Everybody’s at home there.  It’s a man’s house and his front yard, and I tell you they keep it clean.  Paris is washed down every morning; scrubbed and mopped and rubbed dry.  You couldn’t find any more dirt than you could in mother’s kitchen after she’s hung out her wash.  That so, Mr. Westover?”

Westover confirmed in general Jeff’s report of the cleanliness of Paris.

“And beautiful!  You don’t know what a good-looking town is till you strike Paris.  And they’re proud of it, too.  Every man acts as if he owned it.  They’ve had the statue of Alsace in that Place de la Concorde of yours, Mr. Whitwell, where they had the guillotine all draped in black ever since the war with Germany; and they mean to have her back, some day.”

“Great country, Jombateeste!” Whitwell shouted to the Canuck.

The little man roused himself from the muse in which he was listening and smoking.  “Me, I’m Frantsh,” he said.

“Yes, that’s what Jeff was sayin’,” said Whitwell.  “I meant France.”

“Oh,” answered Jombateeste, impatiently, “I thought you mean the Hunited State.”

“Well, not this time,” said Whitwell, amid the general laughter.

“Good for Jombateeste,” said Jeff.  “Stand up for Canada every time, John.  It’s the livest country, in the world three months of the year, and the ice keeps it perfectly sweet the other nine.”

Whitwell could not brook a diversion from the high and serious inquiry they had entered upon.  “It must have made this country look pretty slim when you got back.  How’d New York look, after Paris?”

“Like a pigpen,” said Jeff.  He left his chair and walked round the table toward a door opening into the adjoining room.  For the first time Westover noticed a figure in white seated there, and apparently rapt in the talk which had been going on.  At the approach of Jeff, and before he could have made himself seen at the doorway, a tremor seemed to pass over the figure; it fluttered to its feet, and then it vanished into the farther dark of the room.  When Jeff disappeared within, there was a sound of rustling skirts and skurrying feet and the crash of a closing door, and then the free rise of laughing voices without.  After a discreet interval, Westover said:  “Mr. Whitwell, I must say good-night.  I’ve got another day’s work before me.  It’s been a most interesting evening.”

“You must try it again,” said Whitwell, hospitably.  “We ha’n’t got to the bottom of that broken shaft yet.  You’ll see ’t plantchette ’ll have something more to say about it:  Heigh, Jackson?” He rose to receive Westover’s goodnight; the others nodded to him.