 de Hamal picking his teeth in a balcony, and
should catch a glimpse of us, you would not quite blush for your companion?«
    »Yes,« said she, with that directness which was her best point - which gave
an honest plainness to her very fibs when she told them - which was, in short,
the salt, the sole preservative ingredient of a character otherwise not formed
to keep.
    I delegated the trouble of commenting on this yes to my countenance; or
rather, my under-lip voluntarily anticipated my tongue: of course, reverence and
solemnity were not the feelings expressed in the look I gave her.
    »Scornful, sneering creature!« she went on, as we crossed a great square,
and entered the quiet, pleasant park, our nearest way to the Rue Crécy. »Nobody
in this world was ever such a Turk to me as you are!«
    »You bring it on yourself: let me alone: have the sense to be quiet: I will
let you alone.«
    »As if one could let you alone, when you are so peculiar and so mysterious!«
    »The mystery and peculiarity being entirely the conception of your own brain
- maggots - neither more nor less, be so good as to keep them out of my sight.«
    »But are you anybody?« persevered she, pushing her hand, in spite of me,
under my arm; and that arm pressed itself with inhospitable closeness against my
side, by way of keeping out the intruder.
    »Yes,« I said, »I am a rising character: once an old lady's companion, then
a nursery-governess, now a school-teacher.«
    »Do - do tell me who you are? I'll not repeat it,« she urged, adhering with
ludicrous tenacity to the wise notion of an incognito she had got hold of; and
she squeezed the arm of which she had now obtained full possession, and coaxed
and conjured till I was obliged to pause in the park to laugh. Throughout our
walk she rang the most fanciful changes on this theme; proving, by her obstinate
credulity, or incredulity, her incapacity to conceive how any person not
bolstered up by birth or wealth, not supported by some consciousness of name or
connection, could maintain an attitude of reasonable integrity. As for me, it
quite sufficed to my mental tranquillity that I was known where it imported that
known I should be; the rest sat on me easily: pedigree, social position, and
recondite intellectual acquisition, occupied about the same space and
