I shake my head. “With an old portmanteau and in rags we shall still have the mark of the beast upon us.”
“Do you mind much? do you hate being ridiculous?” asks Elizabeth, meekly, rather depressed by my view of the case; “because if so, let us go somewhere out of the way, where there will be very few people to laugh at us.”
“On the contrary,” return I, stoutly, “we will betake ourselves to some spot where such as we do chiefly congregate—where we shall be swallowed up and lost in the multitude of our fellow-sinners.” A pause devoted to reflection. “What do you say to Killarney?” say I, cheerfully.
“There are a great many fleas there, I believe,” replies Elizabeth, slowly; “flea-bites make large lumps on me; you would not like me if I were covered with large lumps.”
At the hideous ideal picture thus presented to me by my little beloved I relapse into inarticulate idiocy; emerging from which by-and-by, I suggest “The Lakes?” My arm is round her, and I feel her supple body shiver though it is mid July, and the bees are booming about in the still and sleepy noon garden outside.
“Oh—no—no—not there!”
“Why such emphasis?” I ask gaily; “more fleas? At this rate, and with this sine quâ non, our choice will grow limited.”
“Something dreadful happened to me there,” she says, with another shudder. “But indeed I did not think there was any harm in it—I never thought anything would come of it.”
“What the devil was it?” cry I, in a jealous heat and hurry; “what the mischief did you do, and why have not you told me about it before?”
“I did not do much,” she answers meekly, seeking for my hand, and when found kissing it in timid deprecation of my wrath; “but I was ill—very ill—there; I had a nervous fever. I was in a bed hung with a chintz with a red and green fern-leaf pattern on it. I have always hated red and green fern-leaf chintzes ever since.”