"Carlotta," said I, "the first thing you have to learn here is that books in England are more precious than babies in Alexandretta. If you pitch them about in this fashion you will murder them and I shall have you hanged."

This checked her sumptuary excitement. It gave her food for reflection, and she stood humbly penitent, while I went further into the subject of clothes.

"In fact," I concluded, "you will be dressed like a lady." She opened the book at a gaudy picture, "France, XVI(ieme) Siecle—Saltimbanque et Bohemmienne," and pointed to the female mountebank. This young person wore a bright green tunic, bordered with gold and finished off at the elbows and waist with red, over an undergown of flaring pink, the sleeves of which reached her wrist; she was crowned with red and white carnations stuck in ivy.

"I will get a dress like that," said Carlotta.

I wondered how far Mrs. McMurray possessed the colour-sense, and I trembled. I tried to explain gently to Carlotta the undesirability of such a costume for outdoor wear in London; but with tastes there is no disputing, and I saw that she was but half-convinced. She will require training in aesthetics.

She is very submissive. I said, "Run away now to Antoinette," and she went with the cheerfulness of a child. I must rig up a sitting-room for her, as I cannot have her in here. Also for the present she must take her meals in her own apartments. I cannot shock the admirable Stenson by sitting down at table with her in that improper peignoir. Besides, as Antoinette informs me, the poor lamb eats meat with her fingers, after the fashion of the East. I know what that is, having once been present at an Egyptian dinner-party in Cairo, and pulled reeking lumps of flesh out of the leg of mutton. Ugh! But as she has probably not sat down to a meal with a man in her life, her banishment from my table will not hurt her feelings. She must, however, be trained in Christian table-manners, as well as in aesthetics; also in a great many other things.

Mrs. McMurray arrived with a tape-measure, a pencil, and a notebook.

"First," she announced, "I will measure her all over. Then I will go out and procure her a set of out-door garments, and tomorrow we will spend the whole livelong day in the shops. Do you mind if I use part of the 100 for the hire of a private brougham?"

"Have a coach and six, my dear Mrs. McMurray," I said. "It will doubtless please Carlotta better."

I summoned Carlotta and performed the ceremony of introduction. To my surprise she was perfectly at her ease and with the greatest courtesy of manner invited the visitor to accompany her to her own apartments.

When Mrs. McMurray returned to the drawing-room she wore an expression that can only be described as indescribable.

"What, my dear Sir Marcus, do you think is to be the ultimate destiny of that young person?"

"She shall learn type-writing," said I, suddenly inspired, "and make a fair copy of my Renaissance Morals."

"She would make a very fair copy indeed of Renaissance Morals," returned the lady, dryly.

"Is she so very dreadful?" I asked in alarm. "The peignoir, I know—"

"Perhaps that has something to do with it."

"Then, for heaven's sake," said I, "dress her in drabs and greys and subfusc browns. Cut off her hair and give her a row of buttons down the back."

My friend's eyes sparkled.

"I am going," said she, "to have the day of my life tomorrow."

Carlotta had already gone to sleep, so Antoinette informed me, when the results of Mrs. McMurray's shopping came home. I am glad she has early habits. It appears she has spent a happy and fully occupied afternoon over a pile of French illustrated comic papers in the possession of my excellent housekeeper.

I wonder whether it is quite judicious to make French comic papers her initiation into the ideas of Western civilisation. Into this I must inquire. I must also talk seriously to her with a view to her ultimate destiny. But as my view would be distorted by the red dressing-gown, I shall wait until she is decently clad. I think I shall have to set apart certain hours of the day for instructive conversation with Carlotta. I shall have to develop her mind, of which she distinctly has the rudiments. For the rest of the day she must provide entertainment out of her own resources. This her oriental habits of seclusion will render an easy task, for I will wager that Hamdi Effendi did not concern himself greatly as to the way in which the ladies of his harem filled up their time. And now I come to think of it, he certainly did not allow Carlotta to sprawl about his own private and particular drawing-room. I will not westernise her too rapidly. The Turkish educational system has its merits.

This, in its way is comforting. If only I could accept her as a human creature. But when I think of her callous reception of the tidings of the unhappy boy's death, my spirit fails me. Such a being would run a carving-knife into you, as you slept, without any compunction, and when you squeaked, she would laugh. Look at her base ingratitude to the good Hamdi Effendi, who took her in before she was born and has treated her as a daughter all her life. No: her spiritual attitude all through has been that of the ladies who used to visit St. Anthony—in the leisure moments when they were not actively engaged in temptation. I don't believe her father was an English vice-consul. He was Satan.

I wonder what she told Mrs. McMurray.

I have been thinking over the matter to-night. The good lady was wrong. Whatever were the morals of the Renaissance, personalities were essentially positive. They were devilishly wicked or angelically good. There was nothing rosse, non-moral about the Renaissance Italian. The women were strongly tempered. I love to believe the story told by Machiavelli and Muratori of Catherine Sforza in the citadel of Forli. "Surrender or we slay your children which we hold as hostages," cried the besiegers. "Kill them if you like. I can breed more to avenge them." It is the speech of a giant nature. It awakens something enthusiastic within me; although such a lady would be an undesirable helpmeet for a mild mannered man like myself.

And then again there is Bonna, the woman for whose career I desired to consult the prime authority Cristoforo da Costa. I have been sketching her into my chapter tonight. Here is a peasant girl caught up to his saddle-bow by a condottiere, Brunoro, during some village raid. She fights like a soldier by his side. He is imprisoned in Valencia by Alfonso of Naples, languishes in a dungeon for ten years. And for ten years Bonna goes from court to court in Europe and from prince to prince, across seas and mountains, unwearying, unyielding, with the passion of heaven in her heart and the courage of hell in her soul, urging and soliciting her man's release. After ten long years she succeeds. And then they are married. What were her tumultuous feelings as she stood by that altar? The old historian does not say; but the very glory of God must have flooded her being when, in the silence of the bare church, the little bell tinkled to tell her that the Host was raised, and her love was made blessed for all eternity. And then she goes away with him and fights in the old way by his side for fifteen years. When he is killed, she languishes and dies within the year. Porcelli sees them in 1455. Brunoro, an old, squinting, paralysed man. Bonna, a little shrivelled, yellow old woman, with a quiver on her shoulder, a bow in her hand; her grey hair is covered by a helmet and she wears great military boots. The picture is magical. There is infinite pathos in the sight of the two withered, crippled, grotesque forms from which all the glamour of manhood and beauty have departed, and infinite awe in the thought of the holy communion of the unconquerable and passionate souls. I wonder it has not come down to us as one of the great love-stories of the world.

Elements such as these sway the Morals of the Renaissance.

But I am taking Mrs. McMurray too seriously; and it is really not a bad idea to have Carlotta taught type-writing.



CHAPTER V

May 26th.

This morning a letter from Judith.

"Do not laugh at me," she writes. "The road to Paris is paved with good intentions. I really could not help it. Delphine put her great arm round my would-be sequestered and meditative self and carried it off bodily, and here it is in the midst of lunches, picture-shows, dinners, suppers, theatres and dances; and if you laugh, you will make me humiliated when I confess that it is thoroughly enjoying itself."

Laugh at her, dear woman? I am only too glad that she can fling her Winter Garment of Repentance into the Fires of Paris Springtide. She has little enough enjoyment in friendless London. Fill your heart with it, my dear, and lay up a store for use in the dull months to come. For my part, however, I am content to be beyond the reach of Delphine's great arm. I must write to Judith. I shall have to explain Carlotta; but for that I think I shall wait until she becomes a little more explicable. In dealing with women it is well to employ discrimination. You are never quite sure whether they are not merely simple geese or the most complex of created beings. Perhaps they are such a curious admixture that you cannot tell at a given moment which side, the simple or the complex, you are touching. May not there be the deepest of all allegories in Eve standing midway between the innocent apple and the guileful serpent? I shall have to see more of Carlotta before I can safely explain her to Judith.

At any rate she is no longer attired like an odalisque of the Second Empire, and Mrs. McMurray has saved her from the lamentable errors of taste shown by the female mountebank of sixteenth century France. My excellent friend safely delivered up an exhausted and bewildered charge at half-past seven last evening, assuring me that her task had been easy, and that her anticipations of it being the day of her life had been fulfilled. It had been like dressing a doll, she explained, beaming.

An edifying pastime for an adult woman! I did not utter this sentiment, for she would rightly have styled me the most ungrateful of unhung wretches.

Carlotta, then, had followed her about like a perambulatory doll, upon which she had fitted all the finery she could lay her hands on. Apparently the atmosphere of the great shops had acted on Carlotta like an anaesthetic. She had moved in a sensuous dream of drapery, wherein the choice-impulse was paralysed. The only articles upon which, in an unclouded moment, she had set her heart—and that with a sudden passion of covetousness—were a pair of red, high-heeled shoes and a cheap red parasol.

"You have no idea what it means," said Mrs. McMurray, "to buy everything that a woman needs."

I replied that I had a respectful distaste for transcendental philosophy.

"From a paper of pins to an opera-cloak," she continued.

"I'm afraid, dear Mrs. McMurray, an opera-cloak is not the superior limit of a woman's needs," said I. "I wish it were."

She called me a cynic and went.

This morning Carlotta interrupted me in my work.

"Will Seer Marcous come to my room and see my pretty things?"

In summer blouse and plain skirt she looked as demure as any damsel in St. John's Wood. She hung her head a little to one side. For the moment I felt paternal, and indulgently consented. Words of man cannot describe the mass of millinery and chiffonery in that chamber. The spaces that were not piled high with vesture gave resting spots for cardboard boxes and packing-paper. Antoinette stood in a corner gazing at the spoil with a smile of beatific idiocy. I strode through the cardboard boxes which crackled like bracken, and remained dumb as a fish before these mysteries. Carlotta tried on hats. She shewed me patent leather shoes. She exhibited blouses and petticoats until my eyes ached. She brandished something in her hand.

"Tell me if I must wear it" (I believe the sophisticated call it "them"). "Mrs. McMurray says all ladies do. But we never wear it in Alexandretta, and it hurts."

She clasped herself pathetically and turned her great imploring eyes on me.

"Il faut souffrir pour etre belle," I said.

"But with the figure of Mademoiselle, it is stupid!" cried Antoinette.

"It is outrageous that I should be called upon to express an opinion on such matters," I said, loftily. And so it was. My assertion of dignity impressed them.

Then, with characteristic frankness, my young lady shakes out before me things all frills, embroidery, ribbons, diaphaneity, which the ordinary man only examines through shop-front windows when a philosophic mood induces him to speculate on the unfathomable vanity of woman.

"Les beaux dessous!" breathed Antoinette.

"The same ejaculation," I murmured, "was doubtless uttered by an enraptured waiting-maid, when she beheld the stout linen smocks of the ladies of the Heptameron."

I reflected on the relativity of things mundane. The waiting-maid no doubt wore some horror made of hemp against her skin. If Carlotta's gossamer follies had been thrown into the vagabond court of the Queen of Navarre, I wonder whether those delectable stories would have been written?

As Antoinette does not understand literary English, and as Carlotta did not know what in the world I was talking about, I was master of the conversational situation. Carlotta went to the mantel-piece and returned with a glutinous mass of sweet stuff between her fingers.

"Will Seer Marcous have some? It is nougat." I declined. "Oh!" she said, tragically disappointed. "It is good."

There is something in that silly creature's eyes that I cannot resist. She put the abominable morsel into my mouth—it was far too sticky for me to hold—and laughingly licked her own fingers.

I went down to work again with an uneasy feeling of imperilled dignity.

May 29th.

I sent her word that I would take her for a drive this afternoon. She was to be ready at three o'clock. It will be wholesome for her to regard her outings with me as rare occurrences to be highly valued. Ordinarily she will go out with Antoinette—for the present at least—as she did yesterday.

At three o'clock Stenson informed me that the cab was at the door.

"Go up and call Mademoiselle," said I.

In two or three minutes she came down. I have not had such a shock in my life. I uttered exclamations of amazement in several languages. I have never seen on the stage or off such a figure as she presented. Her cheeks were white with powder, her lips dyed a pomegranate scarlet, her eyebrows and lashes blackened. In her ears she wore large silver-gilt earrings. She entered the room with an air of triumph, as who should say: "See how captivatingly beautiful I am!"

At my stare of horror her face fell. At my command to go upstairs and wash herself clean, she wept.

"For heaven's sake, don't cry," I exclaimed, "or you will look like a rainbow."

"I did it to please you," she sobbed.

"It is only the lowest class of dancing-women who paint their faces in England," said I, splendide mendax. "And you know what they are in Alexandretta."

"They came to Aziza-Zaza's wedding," said Carlotta, behind her handkerchief. "But all our ladies do this when they want to make themselves look nice. And I have put on this nasty thing that hurts me, just to please Seer Marcous."

I felt I had been brutal. She must have spent hours over her adornment. Yet I could not have taken her out into the street. She looked like Jezebel, who without her paint must have been, like Carlotta, a remarkably handsome person.

"It strikes me, Carlotta," said I, "that you will find England is Alexandretta upside down. What is wrong there is right here, and vice versa. Now if you want to please me run away and clean yourself and take off those barbaric and Brummagem earrings."

She went and was absent a short while. She returned in dismay. Water would not get it off. I rang for Antoinette, but Antoinette had gone out. It being too delicate a matter for Stenson, I fetched a pot of vaseline from my own room, and as Carlotta did not know what to make of it, I with my own hands cleansed Carlotta. She screamed with delight, thinking it vastly amusing. Her emotions are facile. I cannot deny that it amused me too. But I am in a responsible position, and I am wondering what the deuce I shall be doing next.

I enjoyed the drive to Richmond, where I gave her tea at the Star and Garter and was relieved to see her drink normally from the cup, instead of lapping from the saucer like a kitten. She was much more intelligent than during our first drive on Tuesday. The streets have grown more familiar, and the traffic does not make her head ache. She asks me the ingenuous questions of a child of ten. The tall guardsmen we passed particularly aroused her enthusiasm. She had never seen anything so beautiful. I asked her if she would like me to buy one and give it her to play with.

"Oh, would you, Seer Marcous?" she exclaimed, seizing my hand rapturously. I verily believe she thought I was in earnest, for when I turned aside my jest, she pouted in disappointment and declared that it was wrong to tell lies.

"I am glad you have some elementary notions of ethics," said I. It was during our drive that it occurred to me to ask her where she had procured the paint and earrings. She explained, cheerfully, that Antoinette had supplied the funds. I must talk seriously to Antoinette. Her attitude towards Carlotta savours too much of idolatry. Demoralisation will soon set in, and the utter ruin of Carlotta and my digestion will be the result. I must also make Carlotta a small allowance.

During tea she said to me, suddenly:

"Seer Marcous is not married?"

I said, no. She asked, why not? The devil seems to be driving all womankind to ask me that question.

"Because wives are an unmitigated nuisance," said I.

A curious smile came over Carlotta's face. It was as knowing as Dame Quickly's.

"Then-"

"Have one of these cakes," said I, hurriedly. "There is chocolate outside and the inside is chock-full of custard."

She bit, smiled in a different and beatific way, and forgot my matrimonial affairs. I was relieved. With her oriental training there is no telling what Carlotta might have said.

May 31st.

To-day I have had a curious interview. Who should call on me but the father of the hapless Harry Robinson. My first question was a natural one. How on earth did he connect me with the death of his son? How did he contrive to identify me as the befriender of the young Turkish girl whose interests, he declared, were the object of his visit? It appeared that the police had given him the necessary information, my adventures at Waterloo having rendered their tracing of Carlotta an easy matter. I had been wondering somewhat at the meagre newspaper reports of the inquest. No mention was made, as I had nervously anticipated, of the mysterious lady for whom the deceased had bought a ticket at Alexandretta, and with whom he had come ashore. Very little evidence appeared to have been taken, and the jury contented themselves with giving the usual verdict of temporary insanity. I touched on this as delicately as I could. "We succeeded in hushing things up," said my visitor, an old man with iron-grey whiskers and a careworn sensitive face. "I have some influence myself, and his wife's relations—"

"His wife!" I ejaculated. The ways of men are further than ever from interpretation. The fellow was actually married!

"Yes," he sighed. "That is what would have made such a terrible scandal. Her relatives are powerful people. We averted it, thank Heaven, and his poor wife will never know. My boy is dead. No public investigation into motives would bring him back to life again."

I murmured words of condolence.

"He must have been out of his mind, poor lad, when he induced the girl to run away with him. But, as my son has ruined her," he set his teeth as if the boy's sin stabbed him, "I must look after her welfare."

"You may set your mind at rest on that point," said I. "He smuggled her at once aboard the ship, and seems scarcely to have said how d'ye do to her afterwards. That is the mad part of it."

"Can I be sure?"

"I would stake my life on it," said I.

"How do you know?"

"Frankness—I may say embarrassing frankness is one of the young lady's drawbacks."

He looked greatly relieved. I acquainted him with Carlotta's antecedents, and outlined the part I had played in the story.

"Then," said he, "I will see the child back to her home. I will take her there myself. I cannot allow you any longer to have the burden of befriending her, when it is my duty to repair my boy's wrongdoing."

I explained to him the terror of Hamdi Effendi's clutches, and told him of my promise.

"Then what is to be done?" he asked.

"If any kind people could be found to receive her into their family, and bring her up like a Christian, I should hand her over with the greatest of pleasure. If there is one thing I do not require in this house, it is an idle and irresponsible female. But philanthropists are rare. Who will take her?"

"I'm afraid I'm not prepared to do that."

"I never dreamed of having the bad taste to propose it," said I. "I merely stated the only alternative to my guardianship."

"I should be willing—only too willing—to contribute towards her support," said Mr. Robinson.

I thanked him. But of course this was impossible. I might as well have allowed the good man to pay my gas bill.

"I know of a nice convent home kept by the Little Sisters of St. Bridget," said he, tentatively.

"If it were St. Bridget herself," said I, "I would agree with pleasure. She is a saint for whom I have a great fascination. She could work miracles. When an Irish chieftain made her a facetious grant of as much land as she could cover with her mantle, she bade four of her nuns each take a corner and run north, west, south and east, until her cloak covered several roods. She could have done the same with the soul of Carlotta. But the age of miracles is past, and I fear the Little Sisters would only break their gentle hearts over her. She is an extraordinary creature."

I know I ought to have given some consideration to the proposal; but I think I must suffer from chronic inflammation of the logical faculty. It revolted against the suggested congruity of Carlotta and the Little Sisters of St. Bridget.

"What can she be like?" asked the old man, wonderingly.

"Would it pain you to see her?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, in a low voice. "It would. But perhaps it would bring me nearer to my unhappy boy. He seems so far away."

I rang the bell and summoned Carlotta.

"Perhaps you had better not say who you are," I suggested.

When Carlotta entered, he rose and looked at her—-oh, so wistfully.

"This, Carlotta," said I, "is a friend of mine, who would like to make your acquaintance."

She advanced shyly and held out a timid hand. Obviously she was on her best behaviour. I thanked heaven she had tried her unsuccessful experiment of powder and paint on my vile body and not on that of a stranger.

"Do you—do you like England?" asked the old man.

"Oh, very—very much. Every one is so kind to me. It is a nice place."

"It is the best place in the world to be young in," said he.

"Is it?" said Carlotta, with the simplicity of a baby.

"The very best."

"But is it not good to be old in?"

"No country is good for that."

The old man sighed and took his leave. I accompanied him to the front door.

"I don't know what to say, Sir Marcus. She moves me strangely. I never expected such sweet innocence. For my boy's sake, I would take her in—but his mother knows nothing about it—save that the boy is dead. It would kill her."

The tears rolled down the old man's cheeks. I grasped him by the hand.

"She shall come to no manner of harm beneath my roof," said I.

Carlotta was waiting for me in the drawing-room. She looked at me in a perplexed, pitiful way.

"Seer Marcous?"

"Yes?"

"Am I to marry him?"

"Marry whom?"

"That old gentleman. I must, if you tell me. But I do not want to marry him."

It took me a minute or two to arrive at her oriental point of view. No woman could be shown off to a man except in the light of a possible bride. I think it sometimes good to administer a shock to Carlotta, by way of treatment.

"Do you know who that old gentleman was?" said I.

"No."

"It was Harry's father."

"Oh!" she said, with a grimace. "I am sorry I was so nice to him."

What the deuce am I to do with her?

I lectured her for a quarter of an hour on the ethics of the situation. I think I only succeeded in giving her the impression that I was in a bad temper. So much did I sympathise with Harry that I forbore to acquaint her with the fact that he was a married man when he enticed her away from Alexandretta.



CHAPTER VI

June 1st

Sebastian Pasquale dined with me this evening. Antoinette, forgetful of idolatrous practices, devoted the concentration of her being to the mysteries of her true religion. The excellence of the result affected Pasquale so strongly that with his customary disregard of convention he insisted on Antoinette being summoned to receive his congratulations. He rose, made her a bow as if she were a Marquise of pre-revolutionary days.

"It is a meal," said he, bunching up his fingers to his mouth and kissing them open, "that one should have taken not sitting, but kneeling."

"You stole that from Heine," said I, when the enraptured creature had gone, "and you gave it out to Antoinette as if it were your own."

"My good Ordeyne," said he, "did you ever hear of a man giving anything authentic to a woman?"

"You know much more about the matter than I do," I replied, and Pasquale laughed.

It has been a pleasure to see him again—a creature of abounding vitality whom time cannot alter. He is as lithe-limbed as when he was a boy, and as lithe-witted. I don't know how his consciousness could have arrived at appreciation of Antoinette's cooking, for he talked all through dinner, giving me an account of his mirific adventures in foreign cities. Among other things, he had been playing juvenile lead, it appears, in the comic opera of Bulgarian politics. I also heard of the Viennese dancer. My own little chronicle, which he insisted on my unfolding, compared with his was that of a caged canary compared with a sparrowhawk's. Besides, I am not so expansive as Pasquale, and on certain matters I am silent. He also gesticulates freely, a thing which is totally foreign to my nature. As Judith would say, he has a temperament. His moustaches curl fiercely upward until the points are nearly on a level with his flashing dark eyes. Another point of dissimilarity between us is that he seems to have been poured molten into his clothes, whereas mine hang as from pegs clumsily arranged about my person. By no conceivable freak of outer circumstance could I have the adventures of Pasquale.

And yet he thinks them tame! Lord! If I found myself hatching conspiracies in Sofia on a nest made of loaded revolvers, I should feel that the wild whirl of Bedlam had broken loose around me.

"But man alive!" I cried. "What in the name of tornadoes do you want?"

"I want to fight," said he. "The earth has grown too grey and peaceful. Life is anaemic. We need colour—good red splashes of it—good wholesome bloodshed."

Said I, "All you have to do is to go into a Berlin cafe and pull the noses of all the lieutenants you see there. In that way you'll get as much gore as your heart could desire."

"By Jove!" said he, springing to his feet. "What a cause for a man to devote his life to—the extermination of Prussian lieutenants!"

I leaned back in my arm-chair—it was after dinner—and smiled at his vehemence. The ordinary man does not leap about like that during digestion.

"You would have been happy as an Uscoque," said I. (I have just finished the prim narrative.)

"What's that?" he asked. I told him.

"The interesting thing about the Uscoques," I added, "is that they were a Co-operative Pirate Society of the sixteenth century, in which priests and monks and greengrocers and women and children—the general public, in fact, of Senga—took shares and were paid dividends. They were also a religious people, and the setting out of the pirate fleet at the festivals of Easter and Christmas was attended by ecclesiastical ceremony. Then they scoured the high seas, captured argosies, murdered the crews—their only weapons were hatchets and daggers and arquebuses—landed on undefended shores, ravaged villages and carried off comely maidens to replenish their stock of womenkind at home. They must have been a live lot of people."

"What a second-hand old brigand you are," cried Pasquale, who during my speech had been examining the carpet by the side of his chair.

I laughed. "Hasn't a phase of the duality of our nature ever struck you? We have a primary or everyday nature—a thing of habit, tradition, circumstance; and we also have a secondary nature which clamours for various sensations and is quite contented with vicarious gratification. There are delicately fibred novelists who satisfy a sort of secondary Berserkism by writing books whose pages reek with bloodshed. The most placid, benevolent, gold-spectacled paterfamilias I know, a man who thinks it cruel to eat live oysters, has a curious passion for crime and gratifies it by turning his study into a musee maccabre of murderers' relics. From the thumb-joint of a notorious criminal he can savour exquisitely morbid emotions, while the blood-stains on an assassin's knife fill him with the delicious lust of slaughter. In the same way predestined spinsters obtain vicarious enjoyment of the tender passion by reading highly coloured love-stories."

"Just as that philosophical old stick, Sir Marcus Ordeyne, dus from this sort of thing," said Pasquale.

And he fished from the side of his chair, and held up by the tip of a monstrous heel, the most audacious, high-instepped, red satin slipper I ever saw.

I eyed the thing with profound disgust. I would have given a hundred pounds for it to have vanished. In its red satin essence it was reprehensible, and in its feminine assertion it was compromising. How did it come there? I conjectured that Carlotta must have been trespassing in the drawing-room and dropped it, Cinderella-like, in her flight, when she heard me enter the house before dinner.

Pasquale held it up and regarded me quizzically. I pretend to no austerity of morals; but a burglar unjustly accused of theft suffers acuter qualms of indignation than if he were a virtuous person. I regretted not having asked Pasquale to dinner at the club. I particularly did not intend to explain Carlotta to Pasquale. In fact, I see no reason at all for me to proclaim her to my acquaintance. She is merely an accident of my establishment.

I rose and rang the bell.

"That slipper," said I, "does not belong to me, and it certainly ought not to be here."

Pasquale surrendered it to my outstretched hand.

"It must fit a remarkably pretty foot," said he.

"I assure you, my dear Pasquale," I replied dryly, "I have never looked at the foot that it may fit." Nor had I. A row of pink toes is not a foot.

"Stenson," said I, when my man appeared, "take this to Miss Carlotta and say with my compliments she should not have left it in the drawing-room."

Stenson, thinking I had rung for whisky, had brought up decanter and glasses. As he set the tray upon the small table, I noticed Pasquale look with some curiosity at my man's impassive face. But he said nothing more about the slipper. I poured out his whisky and soda. He drank a deep draught, curled up his swaggering moustache and suddenly broke into one of his disconcerting peals of laughter.

"I haven't told you of the Grefin von Wentzel; I don't know what put her into my head. There has been nothing like it since the world began. Mind you—a real live aristocratic Grefin with a hundred quarterings!"

He proceeded to relate a most scandalous, but highly amusing story. An amazing, incredible tale; but it seemed familiar.

"That," said I, at last, "is incident for incident a scene out of L'Histoire Comique de Francion."

"Never heard of it," said Pasquale, flashing.

"It was the first French novel of manners published about 1620 and written by a man called Sorel. I don't dream of accusing you of plagiarism, my dear fellow—that's absurd. But the ridiculous coincidence struck me. You and the Grefin and the rest of you were merely reenacting a three hundred year old farce."

"Rubbish!" said Pasquale.

"I'll show you," said I.

After wandering for a moment or two round my shelves, I remembered that the book was in the dining-room. I left Pasquale and went downstairs. I knew it was on one of the top shelves near the ceiling. Now, my dining-room is lit by one shaded electrolier over the table, so that the walls of the room are in deep shadow. This has annoyed me many times when I have been book-hunting. I really must have some top lights put in. To stand on a chair and burn wax matches in order to find a particular book is ignominious and uncomfortable. The successive illumination of four wax matches did not shed itself upon L'Histoire Comique de Francion.

If there is one thing that frets me more than another, it is not to be able to lay my hand upon a book. I knew Francion was there on the top shelves, and rather than leave it undiscovered, I would have spent the whole night in search. I suppose every one has a harmless lunacy. This is mine. I must have hunted for that book for twenty minutes, pulling out whole blocks of volumes and peering with lighted matches behind, until my hands were covered with dust. At last I found it had fallen to the rear of a ragged regiment of French novels, and in triumph I took it to the area of light on the table and turned up the scene in question. Keeping my thumb in the place I returned to the drawing-room.

"I'm sorry to have—" I began. I stopped short. I could scarcely believe my eyes. There, conversing with Pasquale and lolling on the sofa, as if she had known him for years, was Carlotta.

She must have seen righteous disapprobation on my face, for she came running up to me.

"You see, I've made Miss Carlotta's acquaintance," said Pasquale.

"So I perceive," said I.

"Stenson told me you wanted me to come to the drawing-room in my red slippers," said Carlotta.

"I am afraid Stenson must have misdelivered my message," said I.

"Then you do not want me at all, and I must go away?"

Oh, those eyes! I am growing so tired of them. I hesitated, and was lost.

"Please let me stay and talk to Pasquale."

"Mr. Pasquale," I corrected.

She echoed my words with a cooing laugh, and taking my consent for granted, curled herself up in a corner of the sofa. I resumed my seat with a sigh. It would have been boorish to turn her out.

"This is much nicer than Alexandretta, isn't it?" said Pasquale familiarly. "And Sir Marcus is an improvement on Hamdi Effendi."

"Oh, yes. Seer Marcous lets me do whatever I like," said Carlotta.

"I'm shot if I do," I exclaimed. "The confinement of your existence in the East makes you exaggerate the comparative immunity from restriction which you enjoy in England."

I notice that Carlotta is always impressed when I use high sounding words.

"Still, if you could make love over garden walls, you must have had a pretty slack time, even in Alexandretta," said Pasquale.

Obviously Carlotta had saved me the trouble of explaining her.

"I once met our friend Hamdi," Pasquale continued. "He was the politest old ruffian that ever had a long nose and was pitted with smallpox."

"Yes, yes!" cried Carlotta, delighted. "That is Hamdi."

"Is there any disreputable foreigner that you are not familiar with?" I asked, somewhat sarcastically.

"I hope not," he laughed. "You must know I had got into a deuce of a row at Aleppo, about eighteen months ago, and had to take to my heels. Alexandretta is the port of Aleppo and Hamdi is a sort of boss policeman there."

"He is very rich."

"He ought to be. My interview with him cost me a thousand pounds—the bald-headed scoundrel!"

"He is a shocking bad man," said Carlotta, gravely.

"I'm afraid it is Mr. Pasquale who is the shocking bad man," I said, amused. "What had you been doing in Aleppo?"

"Maxime debetur," said he.

"English are very wicked when they go to Syria," she remarked.

"How can you possibly know?" I said.

"Oh, I know," replied Carlotta, with a toss of her chin.

"My friend," said Pasquale, lighting a cigarette, "I have travelled much in the East, and have had considerable adventures by the way; and I can assure you that what the oriental lady doesn't know about essential things is not worth knowing. Their life from the cradle to the grave is a concentration of all their faculties, mortal and immortal, upon the two vital questions, digestion and sex."

"What is sex?" asked Carlotta.

"It is the Fundamental Blunder of Creation," said I.

"I do not understand," said Carlotta.

"Nobody tries to understand Sir Marcus," said Pasquale, cheerfully. "We just let him drivel on until he is aware no one is listening."

"Seer Marcous is very wise," said Carlotta, in serious defence of her lord and master. "All day he reads in big books and writes on paper."

I have been wondering since whether that is not as ironical a judgment as ever was passed. Am I wise? Is wisdom attained by reading in big books and writing on paper? Solomon remarks that wisdom dwells with prudence and finds out knowledge of witty inventions; that the wisdom of the prudent is to understand his way; that wisdom and understanding keep one from the strange woman and the stranger which flattereth with her words. Now, I have not been saved from the strange young woman who has begun to flatter with her words; I don't in the least understand my way, since I have no notion what I shall do with her; and in taking her in and letting her loll upon my sofa of evenings, so as to show off her red slippers to my guests, I have thrown prudence to the winds; and my only witty invention was the idea of teaching her typewriting, which is futile. If the philosophy of the excellent aphorist is sound, I certainly have not much wisdom to boast of; and none of the big books will tell me what a wise man would have done had he met Carlotta in the Embankment Gardens.

I did not think, however, that my wisdom was a proper subject for discussion. I jerked back the conversation by asking Carlotta why she called Hamdi Effendi a shocking bad man. Her reply was startling.

"My mother told me. She used to cry all day long. She was sorry she married Hamdi."

"Poor thing!" said I. "Did he ill-treat her?"

"Oh, ye-es. She had small-pox, too, and she was no longer pretty, so Hamdi took other wives and she did not like them. They were so fat and cruel. She used to tell me I must kill myself before I married a Turk. Hamdi was going to make me marry Mohammed Ali one—two years ago; but he died. When I said I was so glad" (that seems to be her usual formula of acknowledgment of news relating to the disasters of her acquaintance), "Hamdi shut me up in a dark room. Then he said I must marry Mustapha. That is why I ran away with Harry. See? Oh, Hamdi is shocking bad."

From this and from other side-lights Carlotta has thrown on her upbringing, I can realise the poor, pretty weak-willed baby of a thing that was her mother, taking the line of least resistance, the husband dead and the babe in her womb, and entering the shelter offered by the amorous Turk. And I can picture her during the fourteen years of her imprisoned life, the disillusion, the heart-break, the despair. No wonder the invertebrate soul could do no more for her daughter than teach her monosyllabic English and the rudiments of reading and writing. Doubtless she babbled of western life with its freedom and joyousness for women; but four years have elapsed since her death, and her stories are only elusive memories in Carlotta's mind.

It is strange that among the deadening influences of the harem she has kept the hereditary alertness of the Englishwoman. She has a baby mouth, it is true; she pleads to you with the eyes of a dog; her pretty ways are those of a young child; but she has not the dull, soulless, sensual look of the pure-bred Turkish woman, such as I have seen in Cairo through the transparent veils. In them there is no attraction save of the flesh; and that only for the male who, deformity aside, reckons women as merely so much cubical content of animated matter placed by Allah at his disposal for the satisfaction of his desires and the procreation of children. I cannot for the life of me understand an Englishman falling in love with a Turkish woman. But I can quite understand him falling in love with Carlotta. The hereditary qualities are there, though they have been forced into the channel of sex, and become a sort of diabolical witchery whereof I am not quite sure whether she is conscious. For all that, I don't think she can have a soul. I have made up my mind that she hasn't, and I don't like having my convictions disturbed.

Until I saw her perched in the corner of the sofa, with her legs tucked up under her, and the light playing a game of magic amid the reds and golds and browns of her hair, while she cheerily discoursed to us of Hamdi's villainy, I never noticed the dull decorum of this room. I was struck with the decorative value of mere woman.

I must break myself of the habit of wandering off on a meditative tangent to the circle of conversation. I was brought back by hearing Pasquale say:

"So you're going to marry an Englishman. It's all fixed and settled, eh?"

"Of course," laughed Carlotta.

"Have you made up your mind what he is to be like?"

I could see the unconscionable Don Juan instinctively preen himself peacock fashion.

"I am going to marry Seer Marcous," said Carlotta, calmly.

She made this announcement not as a jest, not as a wish, but as the commonplace statement of a fact. There was a moment of stupefied silence. Pasquale who had just struck a match to light a cigarette stared at me and let the flame burn his fingers. I stared at Carlotta, speechless. The colossal impudence of it!

"I am sorry to contradict you," said I, at last, with some acidity, "but you are going to do no such thing."

"I am not going to marry you?"

"Certainly not."

"Oh!" said Carlotta, in a tone of disappointment.

Pasquale rose, brought his heels together, put his hand on his heart and made her a low bow.

"Will you have me instead of this stray bit of Stonehenge?"

"Very well," said Carlotta.

I seized Pasquale by the arm. "For goodness sake, don't jest with her! She has about as much sense of humour as a prehistoric cave-dweller. She thinks you have made her a serious offer of marriage." He made her another bow.

"You hear what Sir Granite says? He forbids our union. If I married you without his consent, he would flay me alive, dip me in boiling oil and read me aloud his History of Renaissance Morals. So I'm afraid it is no good."

"Then I mustn't marry him either?" asked Carlotta, looking at me.

"No!" I cried, "you are not going to marry anybody. You seem to have hymenomania. People don't marry in this casual way in England. They think over it for a couple of years and then they come together in a sober, God-fearing, respectable manner."

"They marry at leisure and repent in haste," interposed Pasquale.

"Precisely," said I.

"What we call a marriage-bed repentance," said Pasquale.

"I told you this poor child had no sense of humour," I objected.

"You might as well kill yourself as marry without it."

"You are not going to marry anybody, Carlotta," said I, "until you can see a joke."

"What is a joke?" inquired Carlotta.

"Mr. Pasquale asked you to marry him. He didn't mean it. That was a joke. It was enormously funny, and you should have laughed."

"Then I must laugh when any one asks me to marry him?"

"As loud as you can," said I.

"You are so strange in England," sighed Carlotta.

I smiled, for I did not want to make her unhappy, and I spoke to her intelligibly.

"Well, well, when you have quite learned all the English ways, I'll try and find you a nice husband. Now you had better go to bed."

She retired, quite consoled. When the door closed behind her, Pasquale shook his head at me.

"Wasted! Criminally wasted!"

"What?"

"That," he answered, pointing to the door. "That bundle of bewildering fascination."

"That," said I, "is an horrible infliction which only my cultivated sense of altruism enables me to tolerate."

"Her name ought to be Margarita."

"Why?" I asked.

"Ante porcos," said he.

Certainly Pasquale has a pretty wit and I admire it as I admire most of his brilliant qualities, but I fail to see the aptness of this last gibe. At the club this afternoon I picked up an entertaining French novel called En felons des Perles. On the illustrated cover was a row of undraped damsels sitting in oyster-shells, and the text of the book went to show how it was the hero's ambition to make a rosary of these pearls. Now I am a dull pig. Why? Because I do not add Carlotta to my rosary. I never heard such a monstrous thing in my life. To begin with, I have no rosary.

I wish I had not read that French novel. I wish I had not gone downstairs to hunt for its seventeenth century ancestor. I wish I had given Pasquale dinner at the club.

It is all the fault of Antoinette. Why can't she cook in a middle-class, unedifying way? All this comes from having in the house a woman whose soul is in the stew-pot.



CHAPTER VII

July 1st.

She has been now over five weeks under my roof, and I have put off the evil day of explaining her to Judith; and Judith returns to-morrow.

I know it is odd for a philosophic bachelor to maintain in his establishment a young and detached female of prepossessing appearance. For the oddity I care not two pins. Io son' io. But the question that exercises me occasionally is: In what category are my relations with Carlotta to be classified? I do not regard her as a daughter; still less as a sister: not even as a deceased wife's sister. For a secretary she is too abysmally ignorant, too grotesquely incapable. What she knows would be made to kick the beam against the erudition of a guinea-pig. Yet she must be classified somehow. I must allude to her as something. At present she fills the place in the house of a pretty (and expensive) Persian cat; and like a cat she has made herself serenely at home.

A governess, a fat-checked girl, who I am afraid takes too humorous a view of the position, comes of mornings to instruct Carlotta in the rudiments of education. When engaging Miss Griggs, I told her she must be patient, firm and, above all, strong-minded. She replied that she made a professional specialty of these qualities, one of her present pupils being a young lady of the Alhambra ballet who desires the particular shade of cultivation that will match a new brougham. She teaches Carlotta to spell, to hold a knife and fork, and corrects such erroneous opinions as that the sky is an inverted bowl over a nice flat earth, and that the sun, moon, and stars are a sort of electric light installation, put into the cosmos to illuminate Alexandretta and the Regent's Park. Her religious instruction I myself shall attend to, when she is sufficiently advanced to understand my teaching. At present she is a Mohammedan, if she is anything, and believes firmly in Allah. I consider that a working Theism is quite enough for a young woman in her position to go on with. In the afternoon she walks out with Antoinette. Once she stole forth by herself, enjoyed herself hugely for a short time, got lost, and was brought back thoroughly frightened by a policeman. I wonder what the policeman thought of her? The rest of the day she looks at picture-books and works embroidery. She is making an elaborate bed-spread which will give her harmless occupation for a couple of years.

For an hour every evening, when I am at home, she comes into the drawing-room and drinks coffee with me and listens to my improving conversation. I take this opportunity to rebuke her for faults committed during the day, or to commend her for especial good behaviour. I also supplement the instruction in things in general that is given her by the excellent Miss Griggs. Oddly enough I am beginning to look forward to these evening hours. She is so docile, so good-humoured, so spontaneous. If she has a pain in her stomach, she says so with the most engaging frankness. Sometimes I think of her only, in Pasquale's words, as a bundle of fascination, and forget that she has no soul. Nearly always, however, something happens to remind me. She loves me to tell her stories. The other night I solemnly related the history of Cinderella. She was enchanted. It gave me the idea of setting her to read "Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare." I was turning this over in my mind while she chewed the cud of her enjoyment, when she suddenly asked whether I would like to hear a Turkish story. She knew lots of nice, funny stories. I bade her proceed. She curled herself up in her favourite attitude on the sofa and began.

I did not allow her to finish that tale. Had I done so, I should have been a monster of depravity. Compared with it the worst of Scheherazade's, in Burton's translation, were milk and water for a nunnery. She seemed nonplussed when I told her to stop.

"Are oriental ladies in the habit of telling such stories?" I asked.

"Why, yes," she replied with a candid air of astonishment. "It is a funny story."

"There is nothing funny whatever in it," said I. "A girl like you oughtn't to know of the existence of such things."

"Why not?" asked Carlotta.

I am always being caught up by her questions. I tried to explain; but it was difficult. If I had told her that a maiden's mind ought to be as pure as the dewy rose she would not have understood me. Probably she would have thought me a fool. And indeed I am inclined to question whether it is an advantage to a maiden's after career to be dewy-roselike in her unsophistication. In order to play tunes indifferently well on the piano she undergoes the weary training of many years; but she is called upon to display the somewhat more important accomplishment of bringing children into the world without an hour's educational preparation. The difficulty is, where to draw the line between this dewy, but often disastrous, ignorance and Carlotta's knowledge. I find it a most delicate and embarrassing problem. In fact, the problems connected with this young woman seem endless. Yet they do not disturb me as much as I had anticipated. I really believe I should miss my pretty Persian cat. A man must be devoid of all aesthetic sense to deny that she is delightful to look at.

And she has a thousand innocent coquetries and cajoling ways. She has a manner of holding chocolate creams to her white teeth and talking to you at the same time which is peculiarly fascinating. And she must have some sense. To-night she asked me what I was writing. I replied, "A History of the Morals of the Renaissance." "What are morals and what is the Renaissance?" asked Carlotta. When you come to think of it, it is a profound question, which philosophers and historians have wasted vain lives in trying to answer. I perceive that I too must try to answer it with a certain amount of definition. I have spent the evening remodelling my Introduction, so as to define the two terms axiomatically with my subsequent argument, and I find it greatly improved. Now this is due to Carlotta.

The quantity of chocolate creams the child eats cannot be good for her digestion. I must see to this.

July 2d.

A telegram from Judith to say she postpones her return to Monday. I have been longing to see the dear woman again, and I am greatly disappointed. At the same time it is a respite from an explanation that grows more difficult every day. I hate myself for the sense of relief.

This morning came an evening dress for Carlotta which has taken a month in the making. This, I am given to understand, is delirious speed for a London dress-maker. To celebrate the occasion I engaged a box at the Empire for this evening and invited her to dine with me. I sent a note of invitation round to Mrs. McMurray.

Carlotta did not come down at half-past seven. We waited. At last Mrs. McMurray went up to the room and presently returned shepherding a shy, blushing, awkward, piteous young person who had evidently been crying. My friend signed to me to take no notice. I attributed the child's lack of gaiety to the ordeal of sitting for the first time in her life at a civilised dinner-table. She scarcely spoke and scarcely ate. I complimented her on her appearance and she looked beseechingly at me, as if I were scolding her. After dinner Mrs. McMurray told me the reason of her distress. She had found Carlotta in tears. Never could she face me in that low cut evening bodice. It outraged her modesty. It could not be the practice of European women to bare themselves so immodestly before men. It was only the evidence of her visitor's own plump neck and shoulders that convinced her, and she suffered herself to be led downstairs in an agony of self-consciousness.

When we entered the box at the Empire, a troupe of female acrobats were doing their turn. Carlotta uttered a gasp of dismay, blushed burning red, and shrank back to the door. There is no pretence about Carlotta. She was shocked to the roots of her being.

"They are naked!" she said, quiveringly.

"For heaven's sake, explain," said I to Mrs. McMurray, and I beat a hasty retreat to the promenade.

When I returned, Carlotta had been soothed down. She was watching some performing dogs with intense wonderment and delight. For the rest of the evening she sat spell-bound. The exiguity of costume in the ballet caused her indeed to glance in a frightened sort of way at Mrs. McMurray, who reassured her with a friendly smile, but the music and the maze of motion and the dazzle of colour soon held her senses captive, and when the curtain came down she sighed like one awaking from a dream.

As we drove home, she asked me:

"Is it like that all day long? Oh, please to let me live there!"

A nice English girl of eighteen would not flaunt unconcerned about my drawing-room in a shameless dressing-gown, and crinkle up her toes in front of me; still less would she tell me outrageous stories; but she will wear low-necked dresses and gaze at ladies in tights without the ghost of an immodest thought. I was right when I told Carlotta England was Alexandretta upside-down. What is immoral here is moral there, and vice-versa. There is no such thing as absolute morality. I am very glad this has happened. It shows me that Carlotta is not devoid of the better kind of feminine instincts.



CHAPTER VIII

July 4th.

Judith has come back. I have seen her and I have explained Carlotta.

All day long I felt like a respectable person about to be brought before a magistrate for being drunk and disorderly. Now I have the uneasy satisfaction of having been let off with a caution. I am innocent, but I mustn't do it again.

As soon as I entered the room Judith embraced me, and said a number of foolish things. I responded to the best of my ability. It is not usual for our quiet lake of affection to be visited by such tornadoes.

"Oh, I am glad, I am glad to be back with you again. I have longed for you. I couldn't write it. I did not know I could long for any one so much."

"I have missed you immensely, my dear Judith," said I.

She looked at me queerly for a moment; then with a radiant smile:

"I love you for not going into transports like a Frenchman. Oh, I am tired of Frenchmen. You are my good English Marcus, and worth all masculine Paris put together."

"I thank you, my dear, for the compliment," said I, "but surely you must exaggerate."

"To me you are worth the masculine universe," said Judith, and she seated me by her side on the sofa, held my hands, and said more foolish things.

When the tempest had abated, I laughed.

"It is you that have acquired the art of transports in Paris," said I.

"Perhaps I have. Shall I teach you?"

"You will have to learn moderation, my dear Judith," I remarked. "You have been living too rapidly of late and are looking tired."

"It is only the journey," she replied.

I am sure it is the unaccustomed dissipation. Judith is not a strong woman, and late hours and eternal gadding about do not suit her constitution. She has lost weight and there are faint circles under her eyes. There are lines, too, on her face which only show in hours of physical strain. I was proceeding to expound this to her at some length, for I consider it well for women to have some one to counsel them frankly in such matters, when she interrupted me with a gesture of impatience.

"There, there! Tell me what you have been doing with yourself. Your letters gave me very little information."

"I am afraid," said I, "I am a poor letter writer."

"I read each ten times over," she said.

I kissed her hand in acknowledgment. Then I rose, lit a cigarette and walked about the room. Judith shook out her skirts and settled herself comfortably among the sofa-cushions.

"Well, what crimes have you been committing the past few weeks?"

A wandering minstrel was harping "Love's Sweet Dream" outside the public-house below. I shut the window, hastily.

"Nothing so bad as that," said I. "He ought to be hung and his wild harp hung behind him."

"You are developing nerves," said Judith. "Is it a guilty conscience?" She laughed. "You are hiding something from me. I've been aware of it all the time."

"Indeed? How?"

"By the sixth sense of woman!"

Confound the sixth sense of woman! I suppose it has been developed like a cat's whiskers to supply the deficiency of a natural scent. Also, like the whiskers, it is obtrusive, and a matter for much irritatingly complacent pride. Judith regarded me with a mock magisterial air, and I was put into the dock at once.

"Something has happened," I said, desperately. "A female woman has come and taken up her residence at 26 Lingfield Terrace. A few weeks ago she ate with her fingers and believed the earth was flat. I found her in the Victoria Embankment Gardens beneath the terrace of the National Liberal Club, and now she lives on chocolate creams and the 'Child's Guide to Knowledge.' She is eighteen and her name is Carlotta. There!"

As my cigarette had gone out, I threw it with some peevishness into the grate. Judith's expression had changed from mock to real gravity. She sat bolt upright and looked at me somewhat stonily.

"What in the world do you mean, Marcus?"

"What I say. I'm saddled with the responsibility of a child of nature as unsophisticated and perplexing as Voltaire's Huron. She's English and she came from a harem in Syria, and she is as beautiful as the houris she believes in and is unfortunately precluded from joining. One of these days I shall be teaching her her catechism. I have already washed her face. Kindly pity me as the innocent victim of fantastic circumstances."

"I don't see why I should pity you," said Judith.

I felt I had not explained Carlotta tactfully. If there are ten ways of doing a thing I have noticed that I invariably select the one way that is wrong. I perceived that somehow or other the very contingency I had feared had come to pass. I had prejudiced Judith against Carlotta. I had aroused the Ishmaelite—her hand against every woman and every woman's hand against her—that survives in all her sex.

"My dear Judith," said I, "if a wicked fairy godmother had decreed that a healthy rhinoceros should be my housemate you would have extended me your sympathy. But because Fate has inflicted on me an equally embarrassing guest in the shape of a young woman—"

"My dear Marcus," interrupted Judith, "the healthy rhinoceros would know twenty times as much about women as you do." This I consider one of the silliest remarks Judith has ever made. "Do," she continued, "tell me something coherent about this young person you call Carlotta."

I told the story from beginning to end.

"But why in the world did you keep it from me?" she asked.

"I mistrusted the sixth sense of woman," said I.

"The most elementary sense of woman or any one else would have told you that you were doing a very foolish thing."

"How would you have acted?"

"I should have handed her over at once to the Turkish consulate."

"Not if you had seen her eyes."

Judith tossed her head. "Men are all alike," she observed.

"On the contrary," said I, "that which characterises men as a sex is their greater variation from type than women. It is a scientific fact. You will find it stated by Darwin and more authoritatively still by later writers. The highest common factor of a hundred women is far greater than that of a hundred men. The abnormal is more frequent in the male sex. There are more male monsters."

"That I can quite believe," snapped Judith.

"Then you agree with me that men are not all alike?"

"I certainly don't. Put any one of you before a pretty face and a pair of silly girl's eyes and he is a perfect idiot."

"My dear Judith," said I, "I don't care a hang for a pretty face—except yours."

"Do you really care about mine?" she asked wistfully.

"My dear," said I, dropping on one knee by the sofa, and taking her hand, "I've been longing for it for six weeks." And I counted the weeks on her fingers.

This put her in a good humour. Now that I come to think of it, there is something adorably infantile in grown up women. Shall man ever understand them? I have seen babies (not many, I am glad to say) crow with delight at having their toes pulled, with a "this little pig went to market," and so forth; Judith almost crowed at having the weeks told off on her fingers. Queer!

An hour was taken up with the account of her doings in Paris. She had met all the nicest and naughtiest people. She had been courted and flattered. An artist in a slouch hat, baggy corduroy breeches, floppy tie and general 1830 misfit had made love to her on the top of the Eiffel Tower.

"And he said," laughed Judith, "'Partons ensemble. Comme on dit en Anglais—fly with me!' I remarked that our state when we got to the Champs de Mars would be an effective disguise. He didn't understand, and it was delicious!"

I laughed. "All the same," I observed, "I can't see the fun of making jokes which the person to whom you make them doesn't see the point of."

"Why, that's your own peculiar form of humour," she retorted. "I caught the trick from you."

Perhaps she is right. I have noticed that people are slow in their appreciation of my witticisms. I must really be a very dull dog. If she were not fond of me I don't see how a bright woman like Judith could tolerate my society for half an hour.

I don't think I contribute to the world's humour; but the world's humour contributes much to my own entertainment, and things which appear amusing to me do not appeal, when I point them out, to the risible faculties of another. Every individual, I suppose, like every civilisation, must have his own standard of humour. If I were a Roman (instead of an English) Epicurean, I should have died with laughter at the sight of a fat Christian martyr scudding round the arena while chased by a hungry lion. At present I should faint with horror. Indeed, I always feel tainted with savagery and enjoying a vicarious lust, when I smile at the oft-repeated tale of the poor tiger in Dore's picture that hadn't got a Christian. On the other hand, it tickles me immensely to behold a plethoric commonplace Briton roar himself purple with impassioned platitude at a political meeting; but I perceive that all my neighbours take him with the utmost seriousness. Again, your literary journalist professes to wriggle in his chair over the humour of Jane Austen; to me she is the dullest lady that ever faithfully photographed the trivial. Years ago I happened to be crossing Putney Bridge, in a frock-coat and silk hat, when a passing member of the proletariat dug his elbows in his comrade's ribs and, quoting a music-hall tag of the period, shouted "He's got 'em on!" whereupon both burst into peals of robustious but inane laughter. Now, if I had turned to them, and said, "He would be funnier if I hadn't," and paraphrased, however wittily, Carlyle's ironical picture of a nude court of St. James's, they would have punched my head under the confused idea that I was trying to bamboozle them. Which brings me to my point of departure, my remark to Judith as to the futility of jesting to unpercipient ears.

I did not take up her retort.

"And what was the end of the romance?" I asked.

"He borrowed twenty francs of me to pay for the dejeuner, and his l'annee trente delicacy of soul compelled him to blot my existence forever from his mind."

"He never repaid you?" I asked.

"For a humouristic philosopher," cried Judith, "you are delicious!"

Judith is too fond of that word "delicious." She uses it in season and out of season.

We have the richest language that ever a people has accreted, and we use it as if it were the poorest. We hoard up our infinite wealth of words between the boards of dictionaries and in speech dole out the worn bronze coinage of our vocabulary. We are the misers of philological history. And when we can save our pennies and pass the counterfeit coin of slang, we are as happy as if we heard a blind beggar thank us for putting a pewter sixpence into his hat.

I said something of the sort to Judith, after she had resumed her seat and I had opened the window, the minstrel having wandered to the next hostelry, where the process of converting "Love's Sweet Dream" into a nightmare was still faintly audible. Judith looked at me whimsically, as I stood breathing the comparatively fresh air and enjoying the relative silence.

"You are still the same, I am glad to see. Conversation with the young savage from Syria hasn't altered you in the least."

"In the first place," said I, "savages do not grow in Syria; and in the second, how could she have altered me?"

"If the heavens were to open and the New Jerusalem to appear this moment before you," retorted Judith, with the relevant irrelevance of her sex, "you would begin an unconcerned disquisition on the iconography of angels."

I sat on the sofa end and touched one of her little pink ears. She has pretty ears. They were the first of things physical about her that attracted me to her years ago in the Roman pension—they and the mass of silken flax that is her hair, and her violet eyes.

"Did you learn that particular way of talking in Paris?" I asked.

She had the effrontery to say she was imitating me and that it was a very good imitation indeed.

We talked about the book. I touched upon the great problem that requires solution—the harmonising and justifying of the contradictory opposites in Renaissance character: Fra Lippo Lippi breaking his own vows and breaking a nun's for her; Perugino leading his money-grubbing, morose life and painting ethereal saints and madonnas in his bottega, while the Baglioni filled the streets outside with slaughter; Lorenzo de' Medici bleeding literally and figuratively his fellow-citizens, going from that occupation to his Platonic Academy and disputing on the immortality of the soul, winding up with orgies of sensual depravity with his boon companion Pulci, and all the time making himself an historic name for statecraft; Pope Sixtus IV, at the very heart of the Pazzi conspiracy to murder the Medici—

"And Pope Nicholas V when drunk ordering a man to be executed, and being sorry for it when sober," said Judith.

It is wonderful how Judith, with her quite unspecialised knowledge of history can now and then put her finger upon something vital. I have been racking my brain and searching my library for the past two or three days for an illustration of just that nature. I had not thought of it. Here is Tomaso da Sarzana, a quiet, retired schoolmaster, like myself, an editor of classical texts, a peaceful librarian of Cosmo de' Medici, a scholar and a gentleman to the tips of his fingers; he is made Pope, a King Log to save the cardinalate from a possible King Stork Colonna; the Porcari conspiracy breaks out, is discovered and the conspirators are hunted over Italy and put to death; a gentleman called Anguillara is slightly inculpated; he is invited to Rome by Nicholas, and given a safe-conduct; when he arrives the Pope is drunk (at least Stefano Infessura, the contemporary diarist, says so); the next morning his Holiness finds to his surprise and annoyance that the gentleman's head has been cut off by his orders. It is an amazing tale. To realise how amazing it is, one must picture the fantastic possibility of it happening at the Vatican nowadays. And the most astounding thing is this: that if all the dead and gone popes were alive, and the soul of the saintly Pontiff of to-day were to pass from him, the one who could most undetected occupy his simulacrum would be this very Thomas of Sarzana.

"Pardon me, my dear Judith," said I. "But this is a story lying somewhat up one of the back-waters of history. Where did you come across it?"

"I saw it the other day in a French comic paper," replied Judith.

I really don't know which to admire the more: the inconsequent way in which the French toss about scholarship, or the marvellous power of assimilation possessed by Judith.

Before we separated she returned to the subject of Carlotta.

"Am I to see this young creature?" she asked. "That is just as you choose," said I.

"Oh! as far as I am concerned, my dear Marcus, I am perfectly indifferent," replied Judith, assuming the supercilious expression with which women invariably try to mask inordinate curiosity.

"Then," said I, with a touch of malice, "there is no reason why you should make her acquaintance."

"I should be able to see through her tricks and put you on your guard."

"Against what?"

She shrugged her shoulders as if it were vain to waste breath on so obtuse a person.

"You had better bring her round some afternoon," she said.

Have I acted wisely in confessing Carlotta to Judith? And why do I use the word "confess"? Far from having committed an evil action, I consider I have exhibited exemplary altruism. Did I want a "young savage from Syria" to come and interfere with my perfectly ordered life? Judith does not realise this. I had a presentiment of the prejudice she would conceive against the poor girl, and now it has been verified. I wish I had held my tongue. As Judith, for some feminine reason known only to herself, has steadily declined to put her foot inside my house, she might very well have remained unsuspicious of Carlotta's existence. And why not? The fact of the girl being my pensioner does not in the least affect the personality which I bring to Judith. The idea is absurd. Why wasn't I wise before the event? I might have spared myself considerable worry.

A letter from my Aunt Jessica enclosing a card for a fancy dress ball at the Empress Rooms. The preposterous lady!

"Do come. It is not right for a young man to lead the life of a recluse of seventy. Here we are in the height of the London season, and I am sure you haven't been into ten houses, when a hundred of the very best are open to you—" I loathe the term "best houses." The tinsel ineptitude of them! For entertainment I really would sooner attend a mothers' meeting or listen to the serious British Drama—Have I read so and so's novel? Am I going to Mrs. Chose's dance? Do I ride in the Park? Do I know young Thingummy of the Guards, who is going to marry Lady Betty Something? What do I think of the Academy? As if one could have any sentiment with regard to the Academy save regret at such profusion of fresh paint! "You want shaking up," continued my aunt. Silly woman! If there is a thing I should abhor it would be to be shaken up. "Come and dine with us at seven-thirty in costume, and I'll promise you a delightful time. And think how proud the girls would be of showing off their beau cousin." Et patiti et patita. I am again reminded that I owe it to my position, my title. God ha' mercy on us! To bedeck myself like a decayed mummer in a booth and frisk about in a pestilential atmosphere with a crowd of strange and uninteresting young females is the correct way of fulfilling the obligations that the sovereign laid upon the successors to the title, when he conferred the dignity of a baronetcy on my great-grandfather! Now I come to think of it the Prince Regent was that sovereign, and my ancestor did things for him at Brighton. Perhaps after all there is a savage irony of truth in Aunt Jessica's suggestion!

And a beau cousin should I be indeed. What does she think I would go as? A mousquetaire? or a troubadour in blue satin trunks and cloak, white silk tights and shoes and a Grecian helmet, like Mr. Snodgrass at Mrs. Leo Hunter's fete champetre?

I wish I could fathom Aunt Jessica's reasons for her attempts at involving me in her social mountebankery. If the girls get no better dance-partners than me, heaven help them!

Only a fortnight ago I drove with them to Hurlingham. My aunt and Gwendolen disappeared in an unaccountable manner with another man, leaving me under an umbrella tent to take charge of Dora. I had an hour and a half of undiluted Dora. The dose was too strong, and it made my head ache. I think I prefer neat Carlotta.



CHAPTER IX

July 5th

I lunched at home, and read drowsily before the open window till four o'clock. Then the splendour of the day invited me forth. Whither should I go? I thought of Judith and Hampstead Heath; I also thought of Carlotta and Hyde Park. The sound of the lions roaring for their afternoon tea reached me through the still air, and I put from me a strong temptation to wander alone and meditative in the Zoological Gardens close by. I must not forget, I reflected, that I am responsible for Carlotta's education, whereas I am in no wise responsible for the animals or for Judith. If Judith and I had claims one on the other, the entire charm of our relationship would be broken.

I resolved to take Carlotta to the park, in order to improve her mind. She would see how well-bred Englishwomen comport themselves externally. It would be a lesson in decorum.

I do not despise convention. Indeed, I follow it up to the point when it puts on the airs of revealed religion. My neighbours and I decide on a certain code of manners which will enable us to meet without mutual offence. I agree to put my handkerchief up to my nose when I sneeze in his presence, and he contracts not to wipe muddy boots on my sofa. I undertake not to shock his wife by parading my hideous immorality before her eyes, and he binds himself not to aggravate my celibacy by beating her or kissing her when I am paying a call. I agree, by wearing an arbitrarily fixed costume when I dine with him, to brand myself with the stamp of a certain class of society, so that his guests shall receive me without question, and he in return gives me a well-ordered dinner served with the minimum amount of inconvenience to myself that his circumstances allow. Many folks make what they are pleased to call unconventionality a mere cloak for selfish disregard of the feelings and tastes of others. Bohemianism too often means piggish sloth or slatternly ineptitude.

Convention is solely a matter of manners. That is why I desire to instil some convention into what, for want of a more accurate term, I may allude to as Carlotta's mind. It will save me much trouble in the future.

I summoned Carlotta.

"Carlotta," I said, "I am going to take you to Hyde Park and show you the English aristocracy wearing their best clothes and their best behaviour. You must do the same."

"My best clothes?" cried Carlotta, her face lighting up.

"Your very best. Make haste."

I smiled. She ran from the room and in an incredibly short time reappeared unblushingly bare-necked and bare-armed in the evening dress that had caused her such dismay on Saturday.

I jumped to my feet. There is no denying that she looked amazingly beautiful. She looked, in fact, disconcertingly beautiful. I found it hard to tell her to take the dress off again.

"Is it wrong?" she asked Nvith a pucker of her baby lips.

"Yes, indeed," said I. "People would be shocked."

"But on Saturday evening—" she began.

"I know, my child," I interrupted. "In society you are scarcely respectable unless you go about half naked at night; but to do so in the daytime would be the grossest indecency. I'll explain some other time."

"I shall never understand," said Carlotta.

Two great tears stood, one on each eyelid, and fell simultaneously down her cheeks.

"What on earth are you crying for?" I asked aghast.

"You are not pleased with me," said Carlotta, with a choke in her voice.

The two tears fell like rain-drops on to her bosom, and she stood before me a picture of exquisite woe. Then I did a very foolish thing.

Last week a little gold brooch in a jeweller's window caught my fancy. I bought it with the idea of presenting it to Carlotta, when an occasion offered, as a reward for peculiar merit. Now, however, to show her that I was in no way angry, I abstracted the bauble from the drawer of my writing-table, and put it in her hand.

"You please me so much, Carlotta," said I, "that I have bought this for you."

Before I had completed the sentence, and before I knew what she was after, her arms were round my neck and she was hugging me like a child.

I have never experienced such an odd sensation in my life as the touch of Carlotta's fresh young arms upon my face and the perfume of spring violets that emanated from her person. I released myself swiftly from her indecorous demonstration.

"You mustn't do things like that," said I, severely. "In England, young women are only allowed to embrace their grandfathers." Carlotta looked at me wide-eyed, with the fox-terrier knitting of the forehead.

"But you are so good to me, Seer Marcous," she said.

"I hope you'll find many people good to you, Carlotta," I answered. "But if you continue that method of expressing your appreciation, you may possibly be misunderstood."

I had recovered from the momentary shock to my senses, and I laughed. She fluttered a sidelong glance at me, and a smile as inscrutable as the Monna Lisa's hovered over her lips.

"What would they do if they did not understand?"

"They would take you," I replied, fixing her sternly with my gaze, "they would take you for an unconscionable baggage."

"Hou!" laughed Carlotta, suddenly. And she ran from the room.

In a moment she was back again. She came up to me demurely and plucked my sleeve.

"Come and show me what I must put on so as to please you."

I rang the bell for Antoinette, to whom I gave the necessary instructions. Her next request would be that I should act the part of lady's-maid. I must maintain my dignity with Carlotta.

The lovely afternoon had attracted many people to the park, and the lawns were thronged. We found a couple of chairs at the edge of one of the cross-paths and watched the elegant assembly. Carlotta, vastly entertained, asked innumerable questions. How could I tell whether a lady was married or unmarried? Did they all wear stays? Why did every one look so happy? Did I think that old man was the young girl's husband? What were they all talking about? Wouldn't I take her for a drive in one of those beautiful carriages? Why hadn't I a carriage? Then suddenly, as if inspired, after a few minutes' silent reflection:

"Seer Marcous, is this the marriage market?"

"The what?" I gasped.

"The marriage market. I read it in a book, yesterday. Miss Griggs gave it me to read aloud—Tack—Thack—"

"Thackeray?"

"Ye-es. They come here to sell the young girls to men who want wives." She edged away from me, with a little movement of alarm. "That is not why you have brought me here—to sell me?"

"How much do you think you would be worth?" I asked, sarcastically.

She opened out her hands palms upward, throwing down her parasol, as she did so, upon her neighbour's little Belgian griffon, who yelped.

"Ch, lots," she said in her frank way. "I am very beautiful."

I picked up the parasol, bowed apologetically to the owner of the stricken animal, and addressed Carlotta.

"Listen, my good child. You are passably good-looking, but you are by no means very beautiful. If I tried to sell you here, you might possibly fetch half a crown—"

"Two shillings and sixpence?" asked the literal Carlotta.

"Yes. Just that. But as a matter of fact, no one would buy you. This is not the marriage market. There is no such thing as a marriage market. English mothers and fathers do not sell their daughters for money. Such a thing is monstrous and impossible."

"Then it was all lies I read in the book?"

"All lies," said I.

I hope the genial shade of the great satirist has forgiven me.

"Why do they put lies in books?"

"To accentuate the Truth, so that it shall prevail," I answered.

This was too hard a nut for Carlotta to crack. She was silent for a moment. She reverted, ruefully, to the intelligible.

"I thought I was beautiful," she said.

"Who told you so?"

"Pasquale."

"Pasquale has no sense," said I. "There are men to whom all women who are not seventy and toothless and rheumy at the eyes are beautiful. Pasquale has said the same to every woman he has met. He is a Lothario and a Don Juan and a Caligula and a Faublas and a Casanova."

"And he tells lies, too?"

"Millions of them," said I. "He contracts with their father Beelzebub for a hundred gross a day."

"Pasquale is very pretty and he makes me laugh and I like him," said Carlotta.

"I am very sorry to hear it," said I.

The griffon, who had been sniffing at Carlotta's skirts, suddenly leaped into her lap. With a swift movement of her hand she swept the poor little creature, as if it had been a noxious insect, yards away.

"Carlotta!" I cried angrily, springing to my feet.

The ladies who owned the beast rushed to their whining pet and looked astonished daggers at Carlotta. When they picked it up, it sat dangling a piteous paw. Carlotta rose, merely scared at my anger. I raised my hat.

"I am more than sorry. I can't tell you how sorry I am. I hope the little dog is not hurt. My ward, for whom I offer a thousand apologies, is a Mohammedan, to whom all dogs are unclean. Please attribute the accident to religious instinct."

The younger of the two, who had been examining the paw, looked up with a smile.

"Your ward is forgiven. Punch oughtn't to jump on strange ladies' laps, whether they are Mohammedans or not. Oh! he is more frightened than hurt. And I," she added, with a twinkling eye, "am more hurt than frightened, because Sir Marcus Ordeyne doesn't recognise me."