"Don't you care for the song nowadays?" asked the girl. "Even that doesn't please you?"
"Why should it? I'm no 'betyár,' and have nothing to do with thieves. Gendarmes are honest men, and do their duty. As for a good-for-nothing 'betyár,' he sets a girl to watch outside, and as soon as he sees so much as the tip of a gendarme's helmet, he is off and away, 'O'er the boundless waste,' leaving fish and wine and all behind him. And he shouts it out in his own praise too! The cowardly thief!"
"Well, you have changed since you ate the Emperor's bread!"
"I've not changed, but the times. You can turn a coat inside out if you like. After all it is only a coat. A bunda—fur-lined cloak—is always a bunda."
"And do you know," said the girl, "the greatest insult a man can pay his sweetheart is to quote a worn-out old saw like that——"
"But if I know none better! Perhaps the gentlemen from Moravia, who were here last night, had newer jokes to amuse you with?"
"Better jokes!" said the girl. "Anyway they didn't sit here looking like stuck pigs. The painter especially was a very proper young fellow. If he had only been a hair's breadth taller! As it was he just came up to my chin!"
"Did you measure yourselves then?"
"Rather! Why I taught him to dance csárdás, and he jumped about like a two months old kid on the barn floor!"
"And the cowherd?" asked the man, "did he see you dancing with the German artist, and yet not wring his neck?"