Eugenia did not answer at once. When she spoke her voice did not sound quite like itself. "I knew you had sometimes thought me too demonstrative," she said; "`gushing' I suppose is the only word for it, but I do _so_ dislike it! But as for thinking myself `learned'--oh, Beauchamp, you cannot mean that! I, that every day of my life am more and more deploring my ignorance! How could you think me capable of such folly?" "I did not think you capable of it," answered Beauchamp, slightly nettled. "I only said your manner might make other people think so if you did not take care. And there is another thing I want to say to you, Eugenia. It is really not absolutely necessary for you to tell everybody we meet that you have never been in Paris before. Those people I introduced to you to-day, for instance--Miss Fretville and her brother--I heard you telling them you had not only never been here before, but that you had never been out of England. What business is it of theirs? Why in the world should you expose our private affairs to every casual acquaintance?" "I had no idea what I said could vex you," said Eugenia, humbly, but with considerable astonishment. "Indeed, I could hardly have avoided it. Miss Fretville asked me if I did not think some street or other wonderfully improved by some new buildings--I forget what--and if I did not think the Empress had grown much stouter, and ever so many little things like that--you know the sort of things people make talk about at first--and I was obliged to say I had not been here before. Surely it would have been worse to have pretended I knew about things I had never seen? It is no crime never to have been out of England." There was a little spice of self-assertion in the last sentences which hardly accorded with Captain Chancellor's notion of wifely submission. "Crime!" he repeated. "Nonsense! You know quite well what I mean, only you are so exaggerated. Of course any one that knows you and the quiet way you have been brought up and all that, would not be surprised at your having seen so little; but there is a sort of bravado in decrying one's antecedents unnecessarily, which appears to me the extreme of bad taste." "_Truly_, Beauchamp, I don't understand you," said Eugenia earnestly. "I am very sorry for having annoyed you,"--here her voice for the first time faltered a little--"I will try never to do so again in the same way, but--but I do think you fancy things a little. I was not thinking of my `antecedents' in any way. I simply answered what I was asked. But I am very sorry--very, very sorry I vexed you." The words came very brokenly now and the brown eyes grew suspiciously dewy.