a word
they would enunciate, painfully:

"_Je pense que_--um--_que Nice est le plus belle_--uh--_ville de
France_."

Giddy, listening courteously, his head inclined as though unwilling to
miss one conversational pearl falling from the pretty American's lips,
would appear to consider this gravely. Then, sometimes in an unexpected
burst of pure mischief, he would answer:

"You said something! _Some_ burg, I'm telling the world."

The girl, startled, would almost leap back from the confines of his arms
only to find his face stern, immobile, his eyes sombre and reflective.

"Why! Where did you pick that up?"

His eyebrows would go up. His face would express complete lack of
comprehension. "_Pardon?_"

Afterward, at home, in Toledo or Kansas City or Los Angeles, the girl
would tell about it. "I suppose some American girl taught it to him,
just for fun. It sounded too queer--because his French was so wonderful.
He danced divinely. A Frenchman, and so aristocratic! Think of his being
a professional partner. They have them over there, you know. Everybody's
dancing in Europe. And gay! Why, you'd never know there'd been a war."

Mary Hubbell, of the Winnebago Hubbells, did not find it so altogether
gay. Mary Hubbell, with her father, Orson J. Hubbell, and her mother,
Bee Hubbell, together with what appeared to be practically the entire
white population of the United States, came to Europe early in 1922,
there to travel, to play, to rest, to behold, and to turn their good
hard American dollars into cordwood-size bundles of German marks,
Austrian kronen, Italian lires, and French francs. Most of the men
regarded Europe as a wine list. In their mental geography Rheims, Rhine,
Moselle, Bordeaux, Champagne, or Wuerzburg were not localities but
libations. The women, for the most part, went in for tortoise-shell
combs, fringed silk shawls, jade earrings, beaded bags, and coral neck
chains. Up and down the famous thoroughfare of Europe went the absurd
pale blue tweed tailleurs and the lavender tweed cape suits of America's
wives and daughters. Usually, after the first month or two, they shed
these respectable, middle-class habiliments for what they fondly
believed to be smart Paris costumes; and you could almost invariably
tell a good, moral, church-going matron of the Middle West by the fact
that she was got up like a demimondaine of the second class, in the
naive belief that she looked French and chic.

The three Hubbells w