“‘I don’t understand you, sir,’ replied the chambermaid, somewhat mollified.
“‘Why, my dear girl, if I paid Sambo a dollar for my dinner, I expect to pay Dolly something for my chamber, of course.’
“‘Well, sir, you are certainly very kind,—I—with pleasure, I’m sure,’ replied she, entirely appeased, taking the money and vanishing.
“I,” said Kurz Pacha, “entered my room and locked the door. But I believe I was a little hasty about giving her the money. The perfection of civilization has not yet mounted the stairs. It is confined to the dining-room. How beautiful is that strain from the Favorita, Miss Minerva, tum, tum, ti ti, tum tum, tee tee,” and the delightful Sennaar ambassador, seeing Mrs. Potiphar in the parlor, danced humming away.
There are few pleasanter men in society. I should think with his experience he would be hard upon us, but he is not. The air of courts does not seem to have spoiled him.
“My dear madam,” he said one evening to Mrs. Potiphar, “if you laugh at anything, your laughing is laughed at next day. Life is short. If you can’t see the jewel in the toad’s head, still believe in it. Take it for granted. The Parisienne says that the English woman has no je ne sais quoi, The English woman says the Parisienne has no aplomb. Amen! When you are in Turkey—why gobble. Why should I decline to have a good time at the Queen’s drawing-room, because English women have no je ne sais quoi, or at the grand opera, because French women lack aplomb? Take things smoothly. Life is a merry-go-round. Look at your own grandfather, dear Mrs. Potiphar,—fine old gentleman, I am told,—rather kept in what the artists call the middle-distance, at present,—a capital shoemaker, who did his work well—Alexander and John Howard did no more:—well here you are, you see, with liveries and a pew in the right church, and altogether a front seat in the universe—merry-go-round, you know; here we go up, up, up; here we go down, down, down, etc. By the bye, pretty strain that from Linda; tum tum, ti, tum tum,” and away hopped the Sennaar minister.
Mrs. Potiphar was angry. Who wouldn’t have been? To have the old family shoes thrown in one’s teeth! But our ambassador is an ambassador. One must have the best society, and she swallowed it as she has swallowed it a hundred times before. She quietly remarked—
“Pity Kurz Pacha drinks so abominably. He quite forgets what he’s saying!”
I suppose he does, if Mrs. P. says so; but he seems to know well enough all the time: as he did that evening in the library at Mrs. Potiphar’s, when he drew Cerulea Bass to the book-shelves, and began to dispute about a line in Milton, and then suddenly looking up at the books, said—
“Ah! there’s Milton; now we’ll see.” But when he opened the case, which was foolishly left unlocked, he took down only a bit of wood, bound in blue morocco, which he turned slowly over, so that everybody saw it, and then quietly returned it to the shelf saying only—