me; never laughing, never learning, always
growling, always shuffling, who is like this spider--look!--a tiny body
and huge, hairy legs--pull her legs, the Colonies, off, and leave her
little English body, all shriveled and shrunk alone, and I should like
to know what size she would be then, and how she would manage to swell
and to strut?"

Wherewith Cigarette tossed the spider into the air, with all the supreme
disdain she could impel into that gesture. Cigarette, though she knew
not her A B C, and could not have written her name to save her own life,
had a certain bright intelligence of her own that caught up political
tidings, and grasped at public subjects with a skill education alone
will not bestow. One way and another she had heard most of the floating
opinions of the day, and stored them up in her fertile brain as a bee
stores honey into his hive by much as nature-given and unconscious an
instinct as the bee's own.

Cecil listened, amused.

"You little Anglophobist! You have the tongue of a Voltaire!"

"Voltaire?" questioned Cigarette. "Voltaire! Let me see. I know that
name. He was the man who championed Calas? Who had a fowl in the pot for
every poor wretch that passed his house? Who was taken to the Pantheon
by the people in the Revolution?"

"Yes. And the man whom the wise world pretends still to call without a
heart or a God!"

"Chut! He fed the poor, and freed the wronged. Better than pattering
Paters, that!" said Cigarette, who thought a midnight mass at Notre Dame
or a Salutation at the Madeleine a pretty coup de theatre enough, but
who had for all churches and creeds a serene contempt and a fierce
disdain. "Go to the grandams and the children!" she would say, with a
shrug of her shoulders, to a priest, whenever one in Algiers or Paris
attempted to reclaim her; and a son of the Order of Jesus, famed for
persuasiveness and eloquence, had been fairly beaten once when, in the
ardor of an African missionary, he had sought to argue with the little
Bohemian of the Tricolor, and had had his logic rent in twain, and his
rhetoric scattered like dust, under the merciless home-thrusts and the
sarcastic artillery of Cigarette's replies and inquiries.

"Hola!" she cried, leaving Voltaire for what took her fancy. "We talk
of Albion--there is one of her sons. I detest your country, but I must
confess she breeds uncommonly handsome men."

She was a dilettante in handsome men; she nodded her head now to where,