“One can’t help wondering at some things,” she persisted. “Wondering at marvels of your own manufacture. Are you ready at last?” “Yes; let me take your arm.” “I would rather not: we will walk side by side.” When she took my arm, she always leaned upon me her whole weight; and, as I was not a gentleman, or her lover, I did not like it. “There, again!” she cried. “I thought, by offering to take your arm, to intimate approbation of your dress and general appearance: I meant it as a compliment.” “You did? You meant, in short, to express that you are not ashamed to be seen in the street with me? That if Mrs. Cholmondeley should be fondling her lapdog at some window, or Colonel de Hamal picking his teeth in a balcony, and should catch a glimpse of us, you would not quite blush for your companion?” “Yes,” said she, with that directness which was her best point—which gave an honest plainness to her very fibs when she told them—which was, in short, the salt, the sole preservative ingredient of a character otherwise not formed to keep. I delegated the trouble of commenting on this “yes” to my countenance; or rather, my under-lip voluntarily anticipated my tongue of course, reverence and solemnity were not the feelings expressed in the look I gave her. “Scornful, sneering creature!” she went on, as we crossed a great square, and entered the quiet, pleasant park, our nearest way to the Rue Crécy. “Nobody in this world was ever such a Turk to me as you are!” “You bring it on yourself: let me alone: have the sense to be quiet: I will let you alone.” “As if one _could_ let you alone, when you are so peculiar and so mysterious!” “The mystery and peculiarity being entirely the conception of your own brain—maggots—neither more nor less, be so good as to keep them out of my sight.” “But _are_ you anybody?” persevered she, pushing her hand, in spite of me, under my arm; and that arm pressed itself with inhospitable closeness against my side, by way of keeping out the intruder. “Yes,” I said, “I am a rising character: once an old lady’s companion, then a nursery-governess, now a school-teacher.”