“Now,” he said, “how did you know this was Latin?”
I hung my head.
“Come,” he threatened, “you’d best tell me.”
I was considering what I should do. I reddened excited under my mask, and rose to my feet again. After all these months of obliteration, a wonderful thought was beginning to dawn in me—the thought of my sex as a possible factor in my redemption. For how long, my dear friend, had I not lost the art to play it for the value of so much as a sugar-plum? And what was there now to prevent me from reassuming that charming confidence in men which so disarms them? Alas! it was a vain recovery here—a waste of art on a material no more responsive to it than a pulpit hassock.
“How did you know?” he repeated angrily.
“Because,” I whispered, blushing, and lingering over the sensation I felt I was about to produce—“because—Father—I am a little daughter of the Church.”
He had been gnawing his knuckles, as he bent his morose brows on me; and at my words stopped suddenly, his great teeth bared, like a dog looking up from a bone.
“I am the child of a great gentleman. I was stolen from my parents,” I said, and clasped my hands to him. “I am not a boy at all, but a girl.”
He leapt up as if I had struck him.
“How dare you!” he shouted; then, choking, in another hoarse reaction to panic, “How dare you try to impose upon me!”