Hereupon follows a lively fire of argument between Bobby and his sister; she protesting that she will not espouse a bishop, and he asseverating that she shall. It lasts the best part of a quarter of hour, and ends by reducing Tou Tou to tears.
"But come," says Algy, taking his cigar out of his mouth, throwing his head back, and blowing two columns of smoke out of his nose, "let us take up our subject again where we dropped it. I should be really glad if I could get you to own that you and he"—(indicating my husband by a jerk of his head)—"grew rather sick of each other! Whether you own it or not, I know you did; and it would give me pleasure to hear it. You need not take it personally. I assure you that it is no slur upon him—everybody does. I have talked to lots of fellows who have gone through it, and they all say the same."
"Nancy!" says Bobby, abandoning, at length, his persecution of Tou Tou, and pretending not to hear her last persevering assertion of her determination not to be episcopally wed—"tell the truth, and shame the devil. It would be different if we were strangers, but we that have sported with you since you wore frilled trousers and a bib—come now—did you, or did you not, kneel three times a day, like the prophet Daniel, looking eastward or westward, or whichever way it did look, and yearn for us, and Jacky, and the bun-loaf—come, now?"
"Well, yes," say I, reluctantly making the admission. "I do not say that I did not! Of course, after having been used to you all my life, it would have been very odd if I had not missed you rather badly; but that is a very different thing from being sick of him!"
"Well, we will not say sick," returns Algy, with the air of one who is making a handsome concession, "it is a disagreeable, bilious expression, but it would be useless to try and convince me that any human affection could stand the wear and tear of twenty-eight whole days of an absolute duet and not be rather the worse for it!"
"But it was not an absolute duet," cry I, raising my voice a little, and speaking with some excitement; "you are talking about what you do not know! you are quite wrong."
"Well, it is not the first time in my life that I have been that," he says, philosophically; "but come—who did you the Christian office of interrupting it? tell us."
"I told you in my letters," say I, rather petulantly. "I certainly mentioned—yes, I know I did—we happened at Dresden to fall in with a friend of the general's—at least, a person he knew."
"A person he knew? What kind of a person? Man or woman?"
"Man."