His queer laugh made Gamain look at him with marked astonishment. But he saw that he had blundered in his pretended character by making a witticism, and gave the man no time to study his sentence, for he hastened to recur to the topic by saying:
“A good thing, too; for I think it lowers a man to have to slaver him with Your Majesty here and My Noble Sire there.”
“But you do not have to call him high names. Once in the workshop we drop all that stuff. I call him Citizen, and he calls me Gamain, but I ain’t what you would call chummy with him, while he is familiar with me.”
“That is all very well; but when the dinner hour comes round I expect he sends you off to the kitchen to have your bread and cheese with the flunkeys.”
“Oh, Lor', No! he has never done that; quite the other way about, for he gets me to bring in a table all set into the workshop and he will often put his legs under the mahogany with me, particularly at breakfast, saying: ‘I shall not bother about having breakfast with the Queen, as I should have to wash my hands.'”
“I can’t make this out.”
“You can’t understand that when the King works like us, he has his hands smeared with oil and rust and filings, which does not prevent us being honest folks, and the Queen would say to him, with her hoity-toity prudish air: ‘Dirty beggar, your hands are foul.’ How can a man have a fop’s hands if he works at the forge?”
“Don’t talk to me about that—I might have married high if I could have kept my fingers nice,” sighed the stranger.
“Let me tell you that the old chap does not have a lively time in his geographical study or his library; but I believe he likes my company the best.”
“That is all very amusing for you, except having to endure so poor a pupil.”