Rosina felt disheartened. A ready acquiescence in her views is always discouraging to a woman. What is the use of having views, if they are just tamely agreed to at once?
“I think perhaps men really mean what they say when they say it,” she began; “but, oh dear, they can’t stick to it afterwards. Why, my husband told me that my lightest wish should be his law, and then what do you think he did?”
“He did perhaps kiss you.”
“No, he went and bought a monkey!”
“What is a monkey?”
“Don’t you know what a monkey is?”
“If I know I will not trouble you to ask.”
“C’est un singe,—affe; now you know.”
“Oh, yes; I was thinking of a monk, and of how one told me that you had them not with you.”
Then he scraped gravel for a long time, while her mind wandered through a vista of monks and monkeys, and finally, entering the realm of the present day, paused over the dream of a hat which she had seen that morning in the Theatinerstrasse, a hat with a remarkably clever arrangement of one buckle between two wings; it was in the store that faced—