Chapter 4

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."