“But with the figure of Mademoiselle, it is stupid!” cried Antoinette.
“It is outrageous that I should be called upon to express an opinion on such matters,” I said, loftily. And so it was. My assertion of dignity impressed them.
Then, with characteristic frankness, my young lady shakes out before me things all frills, embroidery, ribbons, diaphaneity, which the ordinary man only examines through shop-front windows when a philosophic mood induces him to speculate on the unfathomable vanity of woman.
“Les beaux dessous!” breathed Antoinette.
“The same ejaculation,” I murmured, “was doubtless uttered by an enraptured waiting-maid, when she beheld the stout linen smocks of the ladies of the Heptameron.”
I reflected on the relativity of things mundane. The waiting-maid no doubt wore some horror made of hemp against her skin. If Carlotta’s gossamer follies had been thrown into the vagabond court of the Queen of Navarre, I wonder whether those delectable stories would have been written?
As Antoinette does not understand literary English, and as Carlotta did not know what in the world I was talking about, I was master of the conversational situation. Carlotta went to the mantel-piece and returned with a glutinous mass of sweet stuff between her fingers.
“Will Seer Marcous have some? It is nougat.” I declined. “Oh!” she said, tragically disappointed. “It is good.”
There is something in that silly creature’s eyes that I cannot resist. She put the abominable morsel into my mouth—it was far too sticky for me to hold—and laughingly licked her own fingers.
I went down to work again with an uneasy feeling of imperilled dignity.