“Well, I haven’t,” she said with decision; “you might think that I was forty, but that is only because I have had so much experience.”

He looked at her in a dubious, troubled way.

“I did not think that you had forty: I did not get that just perhaps. You have not truthfully forty, have you?”

Rosina laughed in unfeigned amusement.

“No, monsieur, I am not thirty even. I told you that if I seemed to be forty, it was because I had had so much experience.”

“So much experience?”

“Yes.”

“You feel that you have had experience?”

“I know it.”

“Experience as, par exemple, me?”