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She liked to be mistaken for a French woman.

She and Gideon spoke the language like natives–or nearly.

She was vain of Gideon’s un-American looks, and cross with him when, on their rare and brief visits to New York, he insisted that he liked American tailoring and American-made shoes. Once or twice, soon after his father’s death, he had said, casually, “You didn’t like Winnebago, did you? Living in it, I mean.”

“Like it!”

“Well, these English, I mean, and French–they sort of grow up in a place, and stay with it and belong to it, see what I mean? and it gives you a kind of permanent feeling. Not patriotic, exactly, but solid and native heathy and Scots-wha-hae-wi’-Wallace and all that kind of slop.”

“Giddy darling, don’t be silly.”

Occasionally, too, he said, “Look here, Julia”–she liked this modern method of address–“look here, Julia, I ought to be getting busy. Doing something. Here I am, nineteen, and I can’t do a thing except dance pretty well, but not as well as that South American eel we met last week; mix a cocktail pretty well, but not as good a one as Benny the bartender turns out at Voyot’s; ride pretty well, but not as well as the English chaps; drive a car—-“

She interrupted him there. “Drive a car better than even an Italian chauffeur. Had you there, Giddy darling.”

She undoubtedly had Giddy darling there. His driving was little short of miraculous, and his feeling for the intricate inside of a motor engine was as delicate and unerring as that of a professional pianist for his pet pianoforte. They motored a good deal, with France as a permanent background and all Europe as a playground. They flitted about the continent, a whirl of glittering blue-and-cream enamel, tan leather coating, fur robes, air cushions, gold-topped flasks, and petrol. Giddy knew Como and Villa D’Este as the place where that pretty Hungarian widow had borrowed a thousand lires from him at the Casino roulette table and never paid him back; London as a pleasing potpourri of briar pipes, smart leather gloves, music-hall revues, and night clubs; Berlin as a rather stuffy hole where they tried to ape Paris and failed, but you had to hand it to Charlotte when it came to the skating at the Eis Palast. A pleasing existence, but unprofitable. No one saw the cloud gathering because of cloud there was none, even of the man’s-hand size so often discerned as a portent.

When the storm broke (this must be hurriedly passed over because of the let’s-not-talk-about-the-war-I’m-so-sick-of-it-aren’t-you feeling) Giddy promptly went into the Lafayette Escadrille. Later he learned never to mention this to an American because the American was so likely to say, “There must have been about eleven million scrappers in that outfit. Every fella you meet’s been in the Lafayette Escadrille. If all the guys were in it that say they were they could have licked the Germans the first day out. That outfit’s worse than the old Floradora Sextette.”

Mrs. Gory was tremendously proud of him, and not as worried as she should have been. She thought it all a rather smart game, and not at all serious. She wasn’t even properly alarmed about her European money, at first. Giddy looked thrillingly distinguished and handsome in his aviation uniform. When she walked in the Paris streets with him she glowed like a girl with her lover. But after the first six months of it Mrs. Gory, grown rather drawn and haggard, didn’t think the whole affair quite so delightful. She scarcely ever saw Giddy. She never heard the drum of an airplane without getting a sick, gone feeling at the pit of her stomach. She knew, now, that there was more to the air service than a becoming uniform. She was doing some war work herself in an incompetent, frenzied sort of way. With Giddy soaring high and her foreign stocks and bonds falling low she might well be excused for the panic that shook her from the time she opened her eyes in the morning until she tardily closed them at night.