"Just the question I asked. He said, 'Oh, because the Emperor was down and the Allies in Paris, and the Emperor's jeweller nobody, and glad to sell the cameos for one-third their cost, when they were finished.'"
"Oh, yes! I see,—at the time of Waterloo."
Mrs. Lewis looked at me again with the same knitted brow and flushed cheek as before.
"All you say is Greek to me. I don't know what malachite is, nor who Raphael is, nor who Psyche is, nor who Marie Louise is, scarcely who Napoleon, and nothing about Waterloo. A pretty present to make to me, is it not? I could make nothing of it. To you it is a whole volume."
I said, with some embarrassment, that it was easy to learn, and that if she—that is, that women should endeavor to improve themselves, and so on. She heard me through, and then said, dryly,—
"How old were you when you were married?"
"I was nearly twenty."
"Were you well-informed? had you read a great deal?"
"What one gets in a country-school,—and being fond of reading;—but then I had always been in an atmosphere of books; and one takes in, one knows not how, a thousand facts"—