“Let the people inside know,” said the Colonel’s wife, “that you’ll be here.”
The girl left with the message, and within a short while the colonel himself appeared,—a respectable gentleman, with a white beard, who was lame and leaned upon Mingote’s arm. Behind these two came a slender young man with fair moustaches and red cheeks; this was, as the baroness gathered, the poet. Then followed a long-haired personage, the piano instructor, on whose arm nestled the elder daughter of the house,—a fair, buxom wench who seemed to have escaped from a painting by Rubens.
“Well, which shall we have first?” asked the Colonel’s wife. “The monologue or the dance?”
“The monologue, the monologue,” was the general chorus.
“Let’s see, then. Silence.”
The poet, who, to judge from the glitter in his eyes and the colour of his cheeks, was quite drunk, smiled amiably.
The little girl began to recite very badly, in the voice of a hoarse rooster, a heap of coarse banalities in doggerel that would have brought a blush to the tanned and weather-beaten cheeks of a coast-guard. And every one of these banalities wound up with the refrain
Don’t you dare touch my chassis!
At the conclusion the colonel offered the opinion that the verses struck him somewhat ... somewhat,—oh,—just a wee bit free, and he looked from one face to another for corroboration. The point was heatedly discussed. The head of the house presented his arguments, but Mingote’s rebuttal was conclusive.
“No, my dear Colonel,” ended the ex-loan shark excitedly. “The fact is that you feel military honour too keenly. You regard this from the standpoint of a soldier.”