The Pension Beaurepas | Page 9

certain satisfaction in not occupying the paternal one. "Don't worry the poor child," said her mother.
"Come on, mother," said Miss Ruck.
"We are going to look about a little," explained the elder lady to me, by way of taking leave.
"I know what that means," remarked Mr. Ruck, as his companions moved away. He stood looking at them a moment, while he raised his hand to his head, behind, and stood rubbing it a little, with a movement that displaced his hat. (I may remark in parenthesis that I never saw a hat more easily displaced than Mr. Ruck's.) I supposed he was going to say something querulous, but I was mistaken. Mr. Ruck was unhappy, but he was very good-natured. "Well, they want to pick up something," he said. "That's the principal interest, for ladies."

CHAPTER IV.

Mr. Ruck distinguished me, as the French say. He honoured me with his esteem, and, as the days elapsed, with a large portion of his confidence. Sometimes he bored me a little, for the tone of his conversation was not cheerful, tending as it did almost exclusively to a melancholy dirge over the financial prostration of our common country. "No, sir, business in the United States is not what it once was," he found occasion to remark several times a day. "There's not the same spring--there's not the same hopeful feeling. You can see it in all departments." He used to sit by the hour in the little garden of the pension, with a roll of American newspapers in his lap and his high hat pushed back, swinging one of his long legs and reading the New York Herald. He paid a daily visit to the American banker's, on the other side of the Rhone, and remained there a long time, turning over the old papers on the green velvet table in the middle of the Salon des Etrangers, and fraternising with chance compatriots. But in spite of these diversions his time hung heavily upon his hands. I used sometimes to propose to him to take a walk; but he had a mortal horror of pedestrianism, and regarded my own taste for it as' a morbid form of activity. "You'll kill yourself, if you don't look out," he said, "walking all over the country. I don't want to walk round that way; I ain't a postman!" Briefly speaking, Mr. Ruck had few resources. His wife and daughter, on the other hand, it was to be supposed, were possessed of a good many that could not be apparent to an unobtrusive young man. They also sat a great deal in the garden or in the salon, side by side, with folded hands, contemplating material objects, and were remarkably independent of most of the usual feminine aids to idleness--light literature, tapestry, the use of the piano. They were, however, much fonder of locomotion than their companion, and I often met them in the Rue du Rhone and on the quays, loitering in front of the jewellers' windows. They might have had a cavalier in the person of old M. Pigeonneau, who possessed a high appreciation of their charms, but who, owing to the absence of a common idiom, was deprived of the pleasures of intimacy. He knew no English, and Mrs. Ruck and her daughter had, as it seemed, an incurable mistrust of the beautiful tongue which, as the old man endeavoured to impress upon them, was pre-eminently the language of conversation.
"They have a tournure de princesse--a distinction supreme," he said to me. "One is surprised to find them in a little pension, at seven francs a day."
"Oh, they don't come for economy," I answered. "They must be rich."
"They don't come for my beaux yeux--for mine," said M. Pigeonneau, sadly. "Perhaps it's for yours, young man. Je vous recommande la mere."
I reflected a moment. "They came on account of Mr. Ruck--because at hotels he's so restless."
M. Pigeonneau gave me a knowing nod. "Of course he is, with such a wife as that--a femme superbe. Madame Ruck is preserved in perfection--a miraculous fraicheur. I like those large, fair, quiet women; they are often, dans l'intimite, the most agreeable. I'll warrant you that at heart Madame Ruck is a finished coquette."
"I rather doubt it," I said.
"You suppose her cold? Ne vous y fiez pas!"
"It is a matter in which I have nothing at stake."
"You young Americans are droll," said M. Pigeonneau; "you never have anything at stake! But the little one, for example; I'll warrant you she's not cold. She is admirably made."
"She is very pretty."
"'She is very pretty!' Vous dites cela d'un ton! When you pay compliments to Mademoiselle Ruck, I hope that's not the way you do it."
"I don't pay compliments to Mademoiselle Ruck."
"Ah, decidedly," said M. Pigeonneau, "you young Americans are droll!"
I should have suspected that these