“Well, I’m not quite sure of how. But you might try.”
“Oh I’m too lazy and too stupid,” Littlemore said.
“Yes,” she replied, musing as she still looked at him. “I think you’re too stupid. But I think you’re also too kind,” she added more graciously. She was almost irresistible when she said such a thing as that.
They talked for a quarter of an hour longer, and at last—as if she had had scruples—she spoke to him of his own marriage, of the death of his wife, matters to which she alluded more felicitously (as he thought) than to some other points. “If you’ve a little girl you ought to be very happy; that’s what I should like to have. Lord, I should make her a nice woman! Not like me—in another style!” When he rose to leave her she made a great point of his coming again—she was to be some weeks longer in Paris. And he must bring Mr. Waterville.
“Your English friend won’t like that—our coming very often,” Littlemore reminded her as he stood with his hand on the door.
But she met this without difficulty. “I don’t know what he has to do with it.”
“Neither do I. Only he must be in love with you.”
“That doesn’t give him any right. Mercy, if I had had to put myself out for all the men that have been in love with me!”
“Of course you’d have had a terrible life. Even doing as you please you’ve had rather an agitated one,” Littlemore pursued. “But your young Englishman’s sentiments appear to give him the right to sit there, after one comes in, looking blighted and bored. That might become very tiresome.”
“The moment he becomes tiresome I send him away. You can trust me for that.”