ded
talk.

The vicomtesse settled down again to her life of books, church, and
refusals to go anywhere except to Darthea at Merion, where she relaxed
and grew tender among the children. She would have her son go among
gayer people, and being free for a time he went as bidden, and was made
much of at the town houses of the gay set. But as he would not play loo
for money, and grew weary at last of the role of Othello and of
relating, much against his will, his adventures to a variety of
attentive Desdemonas who asked questions about his life in France, of
which he had no mind to speak, he soon returned to the more wholesome
company of Schmidt and the tranquil society of the widow's house.

Schmidt, with increasing attachment and growing intimacy of relation,
began again the daily bouts with the foils, the long pulls on the river,
and the talks at night when the house was quiet in sleep.

The grave young Huguenot was rather tired of being made to pass as a
hero, and sternly refused the dinners of the Jacobin clubs, declining to
claim for himself the credit of relieving the Jacobin vicomte, his
kinsman.

The more certain news of war between France and Great Britain had long
since reached Philadelphia, and when, one afternoon in April, Mr.
Alexander Hamilton, just come from a visit to New York, appeared at the
widow's, he said to Schmidt that Citizen Genet, the French minister, had
reached Charleston in the _Ambuscade_, a frigate. He had brought
commissions for privateers, and had already sent out two, the _Citizen
Genet_ and the _Sans Culottes_, to wage war on English commerce. The
Secretary of State, Jefferson, had protested against the French consul's
condemning prizes, but the republican Jacobins, gone mad with joy, took
sides against their leader, and mocked at the President's proclamation
of neutrality. Such was his news. Mr. Hamilton was depressed and had
lost his usual gaiety. It was all bad, very bad. The man's heart ached
for the difficulties of his friend, the harassed President.

Meanwhile imitative folly set the Jacobin fashions of long pantaloons
and high boots for good republicans. The young men took to growing
mustachios. Tricolor cockades appeared in the streets, while the red cap
on barbers' poles and over tavern signs served, with news of the
massacres in France, to keep in De Courval's mind the thought of his
father's fate. In the meantime, amid feasts and clamorous acclaim, Genet
came slowly north