"Take care, and don't ask questions about what doesn't concern you," returned Little Grand, with a laugh—a most irritating laugh. There are times when such cachinnations sting one's ears more than a volley of oaths. "Go home and mind your own business, my chicken. You are a green bird, and nobody minds you, but still you'll find it as well not to come poaching on other men's manors."
"Other men's manors! Mine, if you please," I shouted, so mad with him I could have floored him where he stood.
"Phew!" laughed Little Grand, screwing up his lips into a contemptuous whistle, "you've been drinking too much Bass, my daisy; 'tis n't good for young heads—can't stand it. Go home, innocent."
The insult, the disdainful tone, froze my blood. My heart swelled with a sense of outraged dignity and injured manhood. With a conviction of my immeasurable superiority of position, as the beloved of that divine creature, I emancipated myself from the certain sort of slavery I was generally in to Little Grand, and spoke as I conceived it to be the habit of gentlemen whose honor had been wounded to speak.
"Mr. Grandison, you will pay for this insult. I shall expect satisfaction."
Little Grand laughed again—absolutely grinned, the audacious young imp—and he twelve months younger than I, too!
"Certainly, sir. If you wish to be made a target of, I shall be delighted to oblige you. I can't keep ladies waiting. It is always Place aux dames! with me; so, for the present, good morning!"
And off went the young coxcomb into the Casa di Fiori, and I, only consoled by the reflection of the different reception he would receive to what mine had been (he had a braceleted bouquet, too, the young pretentious puppy!), started off again, assuaging my lacerated feelings with the delicious word of Satisfaction. I felt myself immeasurably raised above the heads of every other man in Malta—a perfect hero of romance; in fact, fit to figure in my beloved Alexandre's most highly-wrought yellow-papered roman, with a duel on my hands, and the love of a magnificent creature like my Eudoxia Adelaida. She had become Eudoxia Adelaida to me now, and I had forgiven, if not forgotten, the dirty dressing-gown: the bottled porter lay, of course, at Brodie's door. If he would condemn spiritual forms of life and light to the common realistic aliments of horrible barmaids and draymen, she could not help it, nor I either. If angels come down to earth, and are separated from their natural nourishment of manna and nectar, they must take what they can get, even though it be so coarse and sublunary a thing as Guinness's XXX, must they not, sir? Yes, I felt very exalté with my affair of honor and my affair of the heart, Little Grand for my foe, and my Marchioness, for a love. I never stopped to remember that I might be smashing with frightful recklessness the Sixth and the Seventh Commandments. If Little Grand got shot, he must thank himself; he should not have insulted me; and if there was a Marquis St. Julian, why—I pitied him, poor fellow! that was all.
Full of these sublime sensations—grown at least three feet in my varnished boots—I lounged into the ball-room, feeling supreme pity for ensigns who were chattering round the door, admiring those poor, pale garrison girls. They had not a duel and a Marchioness; they did not know what beauty meant—what life was!
I did not dance—I was above that sort of thing now—there was not a woman worth the trouble in the room; and about the second waltz I saw my would-be rival talking to Ruthven, a fellow in Ours. Little Grand did not look glum or dispirited, as he ought to have done after the interview he must have had; but probably that was the boy's brass. He would never look beaten if you had hit him till he was black and blue. Presently Ruthven came up to me. He was not over-used to his business, for he began the opening chapter in rather school-boy fashion.