Grant Allen

“ Essie looked in his face, and knew he was playing with her. But her own self-respect wouldn't allow her to say so to him. She only gave a glance of those innocent eyes, and asked him, earnestly: "Stanislas, you must tell me! What had you just now on the stairs in that basket?"
He gazed at her once more with a tender yet mocking smile.
"My little one," he said, "it was thus that Eve fell: you have too much curiosity. Eggs, eggs, my dear Essie; and I was afraid of breaking them. See, here is the proof: I've been making an omelette for Lorikoff's supper." ”

“ America, of course, is a free country." (Essie really believed it.) "We have no tyrants. And if all you tell me about tyrants is true, I can almost understand how people who have lost their own fathers or sons by the despots' commands, might do anything almost to get rid of such wretches. But this is a Republic, where people are quite free, and I didn't know why the Friends of Liberty should want to kill poor, helpless souls, sitting by chance at a café—good folks who, perhaps, may hate the tyrants just as much as they do. ”

“ Then she felt amused herself, to observe how formal all these domestic details of Vermont society sounded, even in her own ears, when one made French prose of them. But to Laminski, they were still stray breaths of Arcadia.
"I suppose you Russians can hardly understand what America's like," she added, after a pause, just to keep conversation rolling, "but we Americans love it."
Laminski started back like one stung. "Mademoiselle!" he cried, angrily.
"What have I done? " Essie asked, drawing away in surprise. "What have I said? Why do you start? Surely we Americans can love America?" ”

“ Geneviève, they found themselves addressing one another as Essie and Stanislas, presque sans le savoir.
But step by step they both of them came to regard it as natural—nay, almost inevitable. Essie admired him unspeakably, and, indeed, there was much to admire in Laminski. A man who could paint with such poetical feeling, who could make such sweet fancies breathe upon canvas, must have much that was good in him. And then, his fiery eloquence! Essie loved to hear him, when work was over, pouring forth his untamable Slavonic soul in torrent floods of denunciation against tyrants. ”

“ Laminski answered, with a curious puckering of the corners of his mouth. "Though I hardly expect it."
"Will you take some tea?" Essie asked, just to relieve the tension. For the first time in her life she was dimly aware of that barrier of sex which she had never felt with the young men in Vermont. But these European men are so strange and so different! They always make you remember, somehow, that they are men and that you are a woman. ”

“ Nothing could be too bad for those wicked creatures if half of what Stanislas said was true about them.
By and by, while Essie was still working at Valentin's, and Laminski was vaguely reflecting upon the ways and means by which at last to marry her, all Paris was startled one memorable morning by the terrible news of an Anarchist bomb outrage. It was the first that had taken place since Essie's arrival, and it shocked and surprised her. To think people should act with such reckless folly! ”

“ Laminski's brow clouded when they spoke these things darkly; and when Laminski was angry it boded no good to anyone. However, in order that nobody should ever say he was seen too often coming down the stairs of that angel's house, he adopted an excellent and saving device: he removed from madame's, that Bohemian pension, and took a room au sixiéme, just above Essie's, in the self-same house in the Boulevard St. Michel. Sacred name of a dog, nobody can blame a man for being seen at night about his own apartments. ”

“ How should you, indeed, who are a pure daughter of the people, a child of toil, born in a free land, from brave tillers of the soil, who cast off long since the rotten fetters of tyranny? It is otherwise in Europe. ”

“ Essie was too innocent to have any fears in committing herself to the unknown world of Paris. With true American guilelessness, she considered it perfectly natural that a girl of twenty should hire a room for herself, au cinquième, in the Boulevard St. Michel, and should present herself as a student at Valentin's studio. ”

“ An English girl under the circumstances would have been terribly oppressed by a vague sense of loneliness. But Essie was not. It is the genius of her countrywomen. She sat down and smiled to herself at her day's work, contentedly. What nice, friendly young men they had all been, to be sure, and how polite they had seemed to her! And Valentin himself had looked approvingly at her first essay, and had muttered to himself, "She will do, the little one." How delicious to be really in Paris, where men and women learn art, And to feel yourself in touch with all those great masters in th? ”