“I hope your other pupils are more gratifying,” I remarked.
“I have no others. They don’t know what French is in this place; they don’t want to know. You may therefore imagine the pleasure it is to me to meet a person who speaks it like yourself.” I replied that my own pleasure was not less; and she went on drawing her stitches through her embroidery, with her little finger curled out. Every few moments she put her eyes close to her work, nearsightedly. I thought her a very disagreeable person; she was coarse, affected, dishonest, and no more a countess than I was a caliph. “Talk to me of Paris,” she went on. “The very name of it gives me an emotion! How long since you were there?”
“Two months ago.”
“Happy man! Tell me something about it What were they doing? Oh, for an hour of the boulevard!”
“They were doing about what they are always doing,—amusing themselves a good deal.”
“At the theatres, eh?” sighed the Countess. “At the cafés-concerts, at the little tables in front of the doors? Quelle existence! You know I am a Parisienne, monsieur,” she added, “to my fingertips.”
“Miss Spencer was mistaken, then,” I ventured to rejoin, “in telling me that you are a Provençale.”
She stared a moment, then she put her nose to her embroidery, which had a dingy, desultory aspect. “Ah, I am a Provençale by birth; but I am a Parisienne by—inclination.”
“And by experience, I suppose?” I said.
She questioned me a moment with her hard little eyes. “Oh, experience! I could talk of experience if I wished. I never expected, for example, that experience had this in store for me.” And she pointed with her bare elbow, and with a jerk of her head, at everything that surrounded her,—at the little white house, the quince-tree, the rickety paling, even at Mr. Mixter.