"Oh, wondrous child! She knows neither the lies nor the flatteries of a court lady. She does not tell me that my breath is ambrosian. She only knows that it was so when her father kissed her, and therefore the lips of every man must be the same! Wife of mine, my father was as hideous as I am, and his wife loved him as dearly as you do me. And yet he was as repulsive as I." "You cannot tell what you are like." "Oh yes, I know. My mother used to tell me. She loved me best of all her children; spoiled me; allowed me my own way in everything. When my brothers and sisters used to complain about it, she would say, 'Let him alone. It is because he has his father's ugliness that I love him so.' But I am a bad man too, and that my father never was. True, he was hot-headed, and a blow was as quick as a word with him; but I am savage by instinct. I am bad because I like it." "That is not true. Who says so?" "I say it myself. Often when I come home with an inch of cane in my hand, having broken it on the backs of all who have come in my way, I feel as if I could break the rest of it on my own head." Here, for the first time noticing that the broken cane still hung from his wrist by the strap, he flung it hastily from him. "No, no, dear," said his wife, "it is that bad men exasperate you to wrath. You have to do with rough people who are stupid and cunning, and that irritates you. If they were good you would treat them kindly." The monster stroked his wife's cheeks with caressing hand. "And you really believe that I am good? Wonderful! I should have thought I had done enough to give proof to the contrary. I thought I was a very devil." Meanwhile his wife had coaxed the monster to her dressing-room, and, sitting him down before the toilet-table, had been busily occupied by the aid of all manner of brushes and combs in bringing hair and beard into something like order. Then she bathed his hot, dusty face with lily water, and stuck court-plaster over the cut on his mouth. "Am I a pretty boy now?" said he, with the look of a child who has just had his face washed. "That you always are to me. But to-day you will have strangers dining with you." "True. And, moreover, grand gentlemen from St. Petersburg--from our Russian Paris. Of course they are accustomed to smart folk, so make me smart. How do we know whether these Frenchified gentlemen will like your Polish cookery? You make light of it, after the manner of women-folk, and then they'll praise it." "Do you wish me to appear at the table?" "Of course. Why not? Even were the Czar himself my guest! Are you not my own little wife? Come, answer; are you not my very own little wife?" She answered a timid "Yes."