I said, 'You must be the same
age as my mamma, if she were alive.' I said other things, about
her husband, which I forget. Oh, I was very polite."
She smiled up at me in quest of approbation. I checked a
horrified rebuke when I reflected that, according to the
etiquette of the harem, she had been "very polite." But my poor
Judith! Every artless question had been a knife thrust in a
sensitive spot. Her husband: the handsome blackguard who had
lured her into the divorce court, married her, and after two
unhappy years had left her broken; children: they would have kept
her life sweet, and did I not know how she had yearned for them?
Her age: it is only the very happily married woman who snaps her
fingers at the approach of forty, and even she does so with a
disquieting sense of bravado. And the sweet insolence of youth
says: "I am eighteen: how old are you?"
My poor Judith! Once more, on our walk home, I discoursed to
Carlotta on the differences between East and West.
"Seer Marcous," said Carlotta this evening at dinner--I have
decided now that she shall dine regularly with me; it is
undoubtedly agreeable to see her pretty face on the opposite side
of the table and listen to her irresponsible chatter: chatter
which I keep within the bounds of decorum when Stenson is
present, so as to save his susceptibilities, by the simple
device, agreed upon between us (to her great delight) of
scratching the side of my somewhat prominent nose--" Seer
Marcous, why does Mrs.
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