“I don’t see how I could have misunderstood you.”
The landlady lifted her shoulders, smiled, and clasped her hands across each other under her throat. Then throwing them apart she said brightly:—
“No, I say at Madame La Rose. Me, my room is all fill’. At Madame La Rose, I say, I think you be pritty well. I’m shoe you be verrie well at Madame La Rose. I’m sorry. But you kin paz yondeh—’tiz juz ad the cawneh? And I am shoe I think you be pritty well at Madame La Rose.”
She kept up the repetition, though Mrs. Richling, incensed, had turned her back, and Richling was saying good-day.
“She did say the room was vacant!” exclaimed the little wife, as they reached the sidewalk. But the next moment there came a quick twinkle from her eye, and, waving her husband to go on without her, she said, “You kin paz yondeh; at Madame La Rose I am shoe you be pritty sick.” Thereupon she took his arm,—making everybody stare and smile to see a lady and gentleman arm in arm by daylight,—and they went merrily on their way.
The last place they stopped at was in Royal street. The entrance was bad. It was narrow even for those two. The walls were stained by dampness, and the smell of a totally undrained soil came up through the floor. The stairs ascended a few steps, came too near a low ceiling, and shot forward into cavernous gloom to find a second rising place farther on. But the rooms, when reached, were a tolerably pleasant disappointment, and the proprietress a person of reassuring amiability.
She bestirred herself in an obliging way that was the most charming thing yet encountered. She gratified the young people every moment afresh with her readiness to understand or guess their English queries and remarks, hung her head archly when she had to explain away little objections, delivered her No sirs with gravity and her Yes sirs with bright eagerness, shook her head slowly with each negative announcement, and accompanied her affirmations with a gracious bow and a smile full of rice powder.
She rendered everything so agreeable, indeed, that it almost seemed impolite to inquire narrowly into matters, and when the question of price had to come up it was really difficult to bring it forward, and Richling quite lost sight of the economic rules to which he had silently acceded in the Rue Du Maine.
“And you will carpet the floor?” he asked, hovering off of the main issue.
“Put coppit? Ah! cettainlee!” she replied, with a lovely bow and a wave of the hand toward Mrs. Richling, whom she had already given the same assurance.