All this was a broken talk, between her attending on the tables; and as she kept up a conversation at each table as she visited it I could not help considering that her mind must be particularly alert. Perhaps it was these rides "to the horizon and back" that kept her mind so agile and her form and face so pure. It was when she was bringing me my last course, a dish of apricots, that a man with a rolling gait, heavy brows, and red, pluffy hands, a big, unwieldy man in a dark, dusty suit, came in and sat down at my table casting his arm over the back of the chair. This fellow "my deared" her instead of following the fashion of the rest, and surveyed me, with his great head flung back and his bulgy eyes travelling over me in an insolent fashion. When she returned with his first order he put up his hand and chucked her under the chin, as it is called. "Sir," said she, with a pucker in her brows, "I have told you before that I did n’t like that:" and she turned away. My vis-à-vis at that turned to his soup, first glancing at me and winking, and then bending over his plate he supped with great noise,—something more than "audible" this,—and perennial suckings of his moustache. When the maid came again at his rather peremptory rattle on the plate, "Angry?" he asks, and then "Tuts! should n’t be angry," and he made as though to embrace her waist, but she stepped back. He turned to me, and, wagging his head toward her, remarked: "She does n’t cotton to me." I make no reply, looking blankly in his face as though I would say: "I don’t want anything to do with you"—just like that. "Ho!" he said, and blew through his nose at me, thrusting out his wet moustache. "Are you deaf or saucy?" I looked at him then alert, and rapped out sharply: "I had rather not speak to you at all, sir. But as to your remark, I am not astonished that the young lady does not cotton to you." With the tail of my eye, as the phrase is, I knew that there was a turning of faces toward me then, and my lady drew herself more erect. "Ho!" cried the bully. "Here’s a fane how-de-do about nothing! You want to learn manners, young man. I reckon you have n’t travelled much, else you would know that gentlemen setting down together at table are not supposed to be so mighty high-toned as to want nothin’ to do with each other." I heard him to an end, and, laying down my spoon, "With gentlemen—yes," I said, "there can be no objection to talk, even though your remark is an evasion of the matter at present. But seeing you have gone out of your way to blame my manners, I will make bold to say I don’t like yours." The girl stepped forward a pace and, "Sir, sir," she began to me and the bully was glaring on me and crying out, "Gentlemen! ’between gentlemen’ you say, and what you insinuate with that?" But I waved aside the girl and to him I began: