It took me a minute or two to arrive at her oriental point of view. No woman could be shown off to a man except in the light of a possible bride. I think it sometimes good to administer a shock to Carlotta, by way of treatment. “Do you know who that old gentleman was?” said I. “No.” “It was Harry’s father.” “Oh!” she said, with a grimace. “I am sorry I was so nice to him.” What the deuce am I to do with her? I lectured her for a quarter of an hour on the ethics of the situation. I think I only succeeded in giving her the impression that I was in a bad temper. So much did I sympathise with Harry that I forbore to acquaint her with the fact that he was a married man when he enticed her away from Alexandretta. CHAPTER VI June 1st Sebastian Pasquale dined with me this evening. Antoinette, forgetful of idolatrous practices, devoted the concentration of her being to the mysteries of her true religion. The excellence of the result affected Pasquale so strongly that with his customary disregard of convention he insisted on Antoinette being summoned to receive his congratulations. He rose, made her a bow as if she were a Marquise of pre-revolutionary days. “It is a meal,” said he, bunching up his fingers to his mouth and kissing them open, “that one should have taken not sitting, but kneeling.” “You stole that from Heine,” said I, when the enraptured creature had gone, “and you gave it out to Antoinette as if it were your own.” “My good Ordeyne,” said he, “did you ever hear of a man giving anything authentic to a woman?” “You know much more about the matter than I do,” I replied, and Pasquale laughed. It has been a pleasure to see him again--a creature of abounding vitality whom time cannot alter. He is as lithe-limbed as when he was a boy, and as lithe-witted. I don’t know how his consciousness could have arrived at appreciation of Antoinette’s cooking, for he talked all through dinner, giving me an account of his mirific adventures in foreign cities. Among other things, he had been playing juvenile lead, it appears, in the comic opera of Bulgarian politics. I also heard of the Viennese dancer. My own little chronicle, which he insisted on my unfolding, compared with his was that of a caged canary compared with a sparrowhawk’s. Besides, I am not so expansive as Pasquale, and on certain matters I am silent. He also gesticulates freely, a thing which is totally foreign to my nature. As Judith would say, he has a temperament. His moustaches curl fiercely upward until the points are nearly on a level with his flashing dark eyes. Another point of dissimilarity between us is that he seems to have been poured molten into his clothes, whereas mine hang as from pegs clumsily arranged about my person. By no conceivable freak of outer circumstance could I have the adventures of Pasquale.