As Miss Fanshawe and I were dressing in the dormitory of the Rue Fossette, she (Miss F.) suddenly burst into a laugh.
“What now?” I asked; for she had suspended the operation of arranging her attire, and was gazing at me.
“It seems so odd,” she replied, with her usual half-honest half-insolent unreserve, “that you and I should now be so much on a level, visiting in the same sphere; having the same connections.”
“Why, yes,” said I; “I had not much respect for the connections you chiefly frequented awhile ago: Mrs. Cholmondeley and Co. would never have suited me at all.”
“Who are you, Miss Snowe?” she inquired, in a tone of such undisguised and unsophisticated curiosity, as made me laugh in my turn.
“You used to call yourself a nursery governess; when you first came here you really had the care of the children in this house: I have seen you carry little Georgette in your arms, like a bonne—few governesses would have condescended so far—and now Madame Beck treats you with more courtesy than she treats the Parisienne, St. Pierre; and that proud chit, my cousin, makes you her bosom friend!”
“Wonderful!” I agreed, much amused at her mystification. “Who am I indeed? Perhaps a personage in disguise. Pity I don’t look the character.”
“I wonder you are not more flattered by all this,” she went on; “you take it with strange composure. If you really are the nobody I once thought you, you must be a cool hand.”
“The nobody you once thought me!” I repeated, and my face grew a little hot; but I would not be angry: of what importance was a school-girl’s crude use of the terms nobody and somebody? I confined myself, therefore, to the remark that I had merely met with civility; and asked “what she saw in civility to throw the recipient into a fever of confusion?”
“One can’t help wondering at some things,” she persisted.