After dinner--it had been an uncommonly good one--I put my hand caressingly within my uncle's arm, and whispered, softly, "Uncle, do you never mean to take me to balls, eh?"
He had been very gay, but he at once grew grave, as he replied,--
"What good would balls do you? Make your eyes droop, and your feet ache! I can't endure the thought of having you whirled about by all the young coxcombs of Prague and then criticised afterwards. Marriages are made in heaven, Zdena, and your fate will find you here, you may be sure."
"But I am not thinking of marriage," I exclaimed, indignantly. "I want to see the world, uncle dear; can you not understand that?" and I tenderly stroked his coat-sleeve.
He shook his curly head energetically.
"Be thankful that you know nothing of the world," he said, with emphasis.
And I suddenly recalled the intense bitterness in my mother's tone as she uttered the word "world," when I waked in the dark night and found her kneeling, crying, at my bedside in our old Paris home.
"Is it really so very terrible--the world?" I asked, meekly, and yet incredulously.
"Terrible!" he repeated my word with even more energy than was usual with him. "It is a hot-bed of envy and vanity, a place where one learns to be ashamed of his best friend if he chance to wear an ill-made coat; that is the world you are talking of. I do not wish you to know anything about it."
This was all he would say.