# The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 91

On board the Roussillon, and subsequently when I reached Paris and Dijon, I tried ardently to plunge into gaiety. I summoned all the light-heartedness I could muster. After all, I had come to lose myself, to try to find a temporary new existence, even to briefly forgetting, if possible, the problem of how to obtain my daughter for myself.
I had gay clothes and plenty of them, and I put wine in my water as everyone else did, and tried to act the part I suppose I actually did look—a modern flapper. Certainly with the short skirts everybody wore then, and with bobbed hair, I could not have looked as old as I was—twenty-six.
But all the superficial gaiety in which I indulged could not make me forget the problem paramount in my mind, and I found myself actually reverting to the study of this man and that man, and wondering whether I would consider him fitted for the role of foster father, in name only. However, the men on board were for the most part very young, and there was but one who looked fairly good to me in this respect. I found out he had a responsible position in a bank, and from his own remarks he evidently had known wealth all his life. He might do, I thought drearily. Then I would shake myself out of this mood and join the young people in their games or talk. But when we landed at Havre, the one man I had quietly been making a study of proceeded to follow his own divergent itinerary, and I forget all about him as a husband possibility.
There were about twenty-five in the Armstrong Party, in which Helen Anderson seemed to be the star traveler. Being with her, ​I always had the best accommodations. In Dijon, therefore, after ten days in Paris and its environs, we were given separate rooms at M. and Mme. Lachat's very picturesque little home. We were to be in Dijon for several weeks, attending the University of Dijon, and going on sight-seeing trips into the adjacent mountain country. The Lachat home had a perfectly charming little garden, shut in all around by a high wall common to many French neighborhoods. Our rooms overlooked the garden, that of Miss Anderson being on the second floor and mine on the first.
Everything thus far had been of absorbing interest to me, and I found Dijon none the less so, with its quaint, narrow streets, quainter homes and smugly contented people. The inhabitants were more than willing to talk French with us struggling foreigners, and I managed to learn more of their language during the few weeks I was there than in the previous six months at Northwestern University in Evanston.
And I was gradually learning other things I had not known well when I landed—for instance, the value of the franc, both to them and to me. At Havre the porter had been bold to ask me for "an American dollar bill, s'il vous plaît," and I had handed him one, for I really felt he meant to give me back some change. But he did not, and I determined that if that was what they charged us Americans for carrying a bag down one flight of stairs, I would do the tipping in my own way after that! I found that the servant class over there was more than Americanized in this respect, and I gradually "caught on."
Miss Anderson and I, as well as several of the other members of the Armstrong Party, were assigned for our meals to the boarding house of Mme. Daillant, a rosy-cheeked woman whose husband dealt in wines and who herself kept up the expenses of the home, I perceived, chiefly by taking boarders. Around our table sat an interesting group: an Italian avocat, several Norwegians, four Americans, including Miss Anderson and myself, and M. and Mme. Daillant, their attractive young daughter of about eighteen, and one other, a French lady. The Italian and I struck up a friendship, and often we took long walks, carrying ​our own dictionaries and consulting them quite frequently along the road to make ourselves understood to each other in the French language.