"Will you
marry me to-morrow?"
"I think it hardly possible, my dear," I answered. "But I shall
lose no time, I assure you. Once you are my wife neither Hamdi
Effendi nor the Sultan of Turkey can claim you. No one can take
an Englishman's wife away from him."
"Hamdi is a devil," said Carlotta.
"We can laugh at him," said I.
"Did you ever see such an ugly mug?"
Where she gets her occasional bits of slang from I do not know;
but her little foreign staccato pronunciation gives them unusual
quaintness. I laughed, and Carlotta, throwing Polyphemus off her
lap, laughed too, and sidled up against me. The cat regarded us
for a moment with a disgusted eye, then stretched himself as if
he had quitted Carlotta of his own accord, and walked away in a
state of dignified boredom.
"Hamdi is like a pig and an elephant and a great fat turkey,"
said Carlotta.
"If all the world were beautiful," I exclaimed, "such a thing as
our appreciation of beauty would not exist. I should not even be
aware that my Carlotta was beautiful.
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