'How you can consent to be tied down here, is the wonder to me!' said he. 'When we travelled through the year, just visited England and were off again, we were driving on our own road. Vienna in April and May—what do you say? You like the reviews there, and the dances, concerts, Zigeuner bands, military Bohemian bands. Or Egypt to-morrow, if you like—though you can't be permitted to swim in the Nile, as you wanted. Come, Xarifa, speak it. I go to exile without you. Say you come.'
She smiled firmly. The name of her honeymoon days was not a cajolery to her.
His name had been that of the Christian Romancero Knight Durandarte, and she gave it to him, to be on the proper level with him, while she still declined.
'Well, but just a month in Paris! There's nothing doing here. And we both like the French theatre.'
'London will soon be filling.'
'Well, but—' He stopped; for the filling of London did really concern her, in the game of Pull she was covertly playing with him. 'You seem to have caught the fever of this London; . . . no bands . . . no reviews . . . Low comedy acting.' He muttered his objections to London.
'The society of people speaking one's own tongue, add that,' she ventured to say.
'You know you are ten times more Spanish than English. Moorish, if you like.'
'The slave of the gallant Christian Knight, converted, baptized, and blissful. Oh, I know. But now we are settled in England, I have a wish to study English society.'
'Disappointing, I assure you;—dinners heavy, dancing boorish, intrigue a blind-man's-buff. We've been over it all before !'