"'I am all the daughters of my father's house,
And all the brothers too!'"
She nods her head gayly as she says this, being pleased at her apt quotation from the one book she has studied very closely.
The duke loses his head a little.
"Do you know," he says, slowly, staring at her the while, "you are the most beautiful woman I ever saw?"
"Ah! so Geoffrey says," returns she, with a perfectly unembarrassed and pleased little laugh, while a great gleam of tender love comes into her eyes as she makes mention of her husband's name. "But I really am not you know."
This answer, being so full of thorough unconsciousness and childish naivete, has the effect of reducing the duke to common sense once more, and of making him very properly ashamed of himself. He feels, however, rather out of it for a minute or two, which feeling renders him silent and somewhat distrait. So Mona, flung upon her own resources, looks round the room seeking for inspiration, and presently finds it.
"What a disagreeable-looking man that is over there!" she says: "the man with the shaggy beard, I mean, and the long hair."
She doesn't want in the very least to know who he is, but thinks it her duty to say something, as the silence being protracted grows embarrassing.
"The man with the mane? that is Griffith Blount. The most objectionable person any one could meet, but tolerated because his tongue is so awful. Do you know Colonel Graves? No! Well, he has a wife calculated to terrify the bravest man into submission, and last year when he was going abroad Blount met him, and asked him before a roomful 'if he was going for pleasure, or if he was going to take his wife with him.' Neat, wasn't it? But I don't remember hearing that Graves liked it."
"It was very unkind," says Mona; "and he has a hateful face."