"Oh, yes, in English I have read him. I can read English well enough, though I speak but a little."
"And have you read the 'Tempest'?"
"How? Ariel, Ferdinand, Miranda, Caliban? Oh, yes. It is beautiful."
"Well, mademoiselle," I said, "do you remember how Miranda first saw Ferdinand?"
She smiled and blushed again—she was such a little blusher. "I know what you would say," she said. "You English are blunt. You talk to young ladies so strangely."
"Well, Mademoiselle Isaline, it seems to me that you at Les Pentes are like Miranda on the island. You see nobody, and there is nobody here to see you. You must not go and fall in love, like Miranda, with the very first man you happen to meet with, because he comes from the Normal School at Geneva. There are plenty of men in the world, believe me, beside M. Claude."
"Ah, but Miranda and Ferdinand both loved one another," said Isaline archly; "and they were married, and both lived happily ever afterward." I saw at once she was trying to pique me.
"How do you know that?" I asked. "It doesn't say so in the play. For all I know, Ferdinand lost the crown of Naples through a revolution, and went and settled down at a country school in Savoy or somewhere, and took to drinking, and became brutally unsociable, and made Miranda's life a toil and a burden to her. At any rate, I'm sure of one thing; he wasn't worthy of her."
What made me go on in this stupid way? I'm sure I don't know. I certainly didn't mean to marry Isaline myself: ... at least, not definitely: and yet when you are sitting down at tea on a rustic garden seat, with a pretty girl in a charming white crimped cap beside you, and you get a chance of insinuating that other fellows don't think quite as much of her as you do, it isn't human nature to let slip the opportunity of insinuating it.
"But you don't know M. Claude," said Isaline practically, "and so you can't tell whether he is worthy of me or not."