“Ill! Were it not for you, I would be gone. You alone sustain me—it is for the pleasure of seeing you that I suffer. What kind of a menage is this, then, where I am walked around Institutions, where I am forced to listen to the exposition of doctrines, where the coffee is weak, where Sunday, which the bon Dieu set aside for a jour de fete resembles to a day in purgatory?”
“But, Vicomte,” Honora laughed, “you must remember that you are in America, and that you have come here to study our manners and customs.”
“Ah, no,” he cried, “ah, no, it cannot all be like this! I will not believe it. Mr. Holt, who sought to entertain me before luncheon, offered to show me his collection of Chinese carvings! I, who might be at Trouville or Cabourg! If it were not for you, Mademoiselle, I should not stay here—not one little minute,” he said, with a slow intensity. “Behold what I suffer for your sake!”
“For my sake?” echoed Honora.
“For what else?” demanded the Vicomte, gazing upon her with the eyes of martyrdom. “It is not for my health, alas! Between the coffee and this dimanche I have the vertigo.”
Honora laughed again at the memory of the dizzy Sunday afternoons of her childhood, when she had been taken to see Mr. Isham's curios.
“You are cruel,” said the Vicomte; “you laugh at my tortures.”
“On the contrary, I think I understand them,” she replied. “I have often felt the same way.”
“My instinct was true, then,” he cried triumphantly; “the first time my eyes fell on you, I said to myself, 'ah! there is one who understands.' And I am seldom mistaken.”
“Your experience with the opposite sex,” ventured Honora, “must have made you infallible.”