"Really and truly?"
"Why should I wish to deceive you? Do I ever look glum and sour like a man who is discontented with his lot?"
"That is only because you have such an uncommonly good disposition, perhaps."
"That depends. If I were obliged to live with that abominable old skinflint Ramon, I should soon become intolerable."
"Why are you so hard upon that poor man?"
"The recollection of the torture I endured under his roof, I suppose."
"Torture?"
"What else do you call it, father, to live in a big, cold, dilapidated, cheerless house,—a house so dreary, in fact, that the grave seems a cheerful abode in comparison? And then to see those two thin, solemn-faced, famished-looking servants wandering about in that grim sepulchre! And the meals,—meals at which the master of the house seems to count each morsel that you eat! And his daughter,—for the man has a daughter who will perpetuate the breed, I suppose,—and his daughter, who doles out scanty portions for the domestics, and then carefully locks up the remains of the meagre meal!"
"Louis, Louis, how is it that you, who are usually so charitably inclined, should be so strangely hostile to this poor man and his daughter?"
"His daughter! Can you call such a thing as that a daughter, a big, raw-boned creature, with feet and hands like a man's, a face like a nutcracker, and a nose,—great Heavens! what a nose,—a nose as long as that, and of a brick-red colour? But justice compels me to say that this incomparable creature has yellow hair and black teeth to make up for her red nose."