Chapter 27 - Page 2

and asked 'what she saw in civility to throw the recipient into a fever of confusion?'

'One can't help wondering at some things,' she persisted.

'Wondering at marvels of your own manufacture. Are you ready at last?'

'Yes; let me take your arm.'

'I would rather not: we will walk side by side.'

When she took my arm, she always leaned upon me her whole weight; and, as I was not a gentleman, or her lover, I did not like it.

'There, again!' she cried. 'I thought, by offering to take your arm, to intimate approbation of your dress and general appearance: I meant it as a compliment.'

'You did? You mean, in short, to express that you are not ashamed to be seen in the street with me? That if Mrs. Cholmondeley should be fondling her lapdog at some window, or Colonel de Hamal picking his teeth in a balcony, and should catch a glimpse of us, you would not quite blush for your companion?'

'Yes,' said she, with that directness which was her best point - which gave an honest plainness to her very fibs when she told them - which was, in short, the salt, the sole preservative ingredient of a character otherwise not formed to keep.

I delegated the trouble of commenting on this 'yes' to my countenance; or rather, my under-lip voluntarily anticipated my tongue: of course, reverence and solemnity were not the feelings expressed in the look I gave her.

'Scornful, sneering creature!' she went on, as we crossed a great square, and entered the quiet, pleasant park, our nearest way to the Rue CrA©cy. 'Nobody in this world was ever such a Turk to me as you are!'

'You bring it on yourself: let me alone: have the sense to be quiet: I will let you alone.'

'As if one could let you alone, when you are so peculiar and so mysterious!'

'The mystery and peculiarity being entirely the conception of your own brain - maggots - neither more nor less, be so good as to keep them out of my sight.'

'But are you anybody?' persevered she, pushing her hand, in spite of me, under my arm; and that arm pressed itself with inhospitable closeness against my side, by way of keeping out the intruder.

'Yes,' I said, 'I am a rising character: once an old lady's companion, then a nursery-governess, now a school-teacher.'

'Do - do tell me who you are? I'll not repeat it,' she urged, adhering with ludicrous tenacity to the wise notion of an incognito she had got hold of; and she squeezed the arm of which she had now obtained full possession, and coaxed and conjured till I was obliged to pause in the park to laugh. Throughout our walk she rang the most fanciful changes on this theme; proving, by her obstinate credulity, or incredulity, her incapacity to conceive how any person not bolstered up by birth or wealth, not supported by some consciousness of name or connection, could maintain an attitude of reasonable integrity. As