"Well, what is your idea, snake-girl?"
"Why do you call me 'snake-girl'?" I asked. "I hate snakes."
She took her cigarette out of her mouth, and looked at me for some seconds.
"Because you are so sinuous; there is not a stiff line about your movements, you are utterly wicked-looking and attractive, too, and un-English, and what in the world Aunt Katherine asked you here for with those hideous girls I can't imagine. I would not have, if my three angels were grown up, and like them—" Then she showed me the photographs of her three angels—they are pets.
But my looks seemed to bother her, for she went back to them.
"Where do you get them from? Was your mother some other nation?"
I told her how poor mamma had been rather an accident, and was nobody much. "One could not tell, you see; she might have had any quaint creature beyond the grand-parents—perhaps I am mixed with Red Indian or nigger."
She looked at me searchingly.
"No, you are not; you are Venetian. That is it—some wicked, beautiful friend of a Doge, come to life again."
"I know I am wicked," I said. "I am always told it; but I have not done anything yet, or had any fun out of it, and I do want to."