"Mamma!"
"I am hungry."
"Are you?"
"I am."
"Mamma, I am warm."
"Are you?"
"I am."
You believe that this truly English dialogue made me smile? Not at all, Monsieur; I was under a spell. Mary-Ann's voice had worked a charm; the truth is that as I listened, I experienced a delicious agony, and found my heart beating almost to suffocation. In all my life, I had never heard anything so young, so fresh, so silvery as that voice. The sound of a golden shower falling on my father's roof would have, truly, sounded less sweet to me. I thought to myself: "What a misfortune that the sweetest songsters among birds are necessarily the ugliest." And I feared to see her face, and yet I was consumed with eager desire to look upon it, such a strong empire has curiosity over me.
Dimitri had calculated upon reaching the inn at Calyvia at breakfast time. It was a house made of planks, loosely put together; but one could always find there a goat-skin bottle of resin wine; a bottle of rhaki; that is to say, of anise-seed cordial; some brown bread; eggs; and a regiment of venerable hens transformed by death into pullets, by virtue of metempsychosis. Unfortunately, the inn was deserted and the door closed. At this news, Mrs. Simons had a bitter quarrel with Dimitri, and as she turned around, I saw a face as sharp as the blade of a Sheffield knife, with two rows of teeth like a palisade. "I am English," she said, "and I expect to eat when I am hungry."
"Madame," Dimitri piteously replied, "you can breakfast, in half-an-hour, in the village of Castia."