nto turbulent times and she might become a demon of
mischief. At present she is altogether undeveloped. She is two and
twenty in years, but a child, or rather a piquant, amusing young girl,
in manner, and perhaps in disposition. She is an enigma of which I
should be sorry to have to undertake the solution. As she seems, I like
her immensely, but when I try to fathom what she really is, she
frightens me."

The others laughed.

"Poor little Minette," Pierre Leroux said. "You are too hard upon her
altogether, Cuthbert. The girl is a born actress and would make her
fortune on the stage. She can represent, by the instinct of art,
passions which she has never felt. She can be simple and majestic, a
laughing girl and a furious woman, a Christian martyr and a bacchanal,
simply because she has mobile features, intelligence, sentiment,
emotion, and a woman's instinct, that is all. She is a jolly little
girl, and the only fault I have to find with her is that she has the bad
taste to prefer that gloomy American to me."

"Well, I hope you are right, Pierre, though I hold my own opinion
unchanged--at any rate I sincerely trust that Dampierre will not make a
fool of himself with her. You men do not like him because you don't
understand him. You are gay and light-hearted, you take life as it
comes. You form connections easily and lightly, and break them off again
a few months later just as easily. Dampierre takes life earnestly. He is
indolent, but that is a matter of race and blood. He would not do a
dishonorable action to save his life. I believe he is the heir to a
large fortune, and he can, therefore, afford to work at his art in a
dilettante sort of manner, and not like us poor beggars who look forward
to earning our livelihood by it. He is passionate, I grant, but that is
the effect of his bringing up on a plantation in Louisiana, surrounded
by his father's slaves, for though they are now free by law the nature
of the negro is unchanged, and servitude is his natural position. The
little white master is treated like a god, every whim is humored, and
there being no restraining hand upon him, it would be strange if he did
not become hasty and somewhat arrogant.

"Not that there is any arrogance about Dampierre--he is unaffected and
simple in his tastes, except in the matter of his lodgings. I question
if there is one of us who spends less than he does, but he no more
understands you than you understand him; he takes your badina