I smiled, for I did not want to make her unhappy, and I spoke to her intelligibly. “Well, well, when you have quite learned all the English ways, I’ll try and find you a nice husband. Now you had better go to bed.” She retired, quite consoled. When the door closed behind her, Pasquale shook his head at me. “Wasted! Criminally wasted!” “What?” “That,” he answered, pointing to the door. “That bundle of bewildering fascination.” “That,” said I, “is an horrible infliction which only my cultivated sense of altruism enables me to tolerate.” “Her name ought to be Margarita.” “Why?” I asked. “_Ante porcos_,” said he. Certainly Pasquale has a pretty wit and I admire it as I admire most of his brilliant qualities, but I fail to see the aptness of this last gibe. At the club this afternoon I picked up an entertaining French novel called _En felons des Perles_. On the illustrated cover was a row of undraped damsels sitting in oyster-shells, and the text of the book went to show how it was the hero’s ambition to make a rosary of these pearls. Now I am a dull pig. Why? Because I do not add Carlotta to my rosary. I never heard such a monstrous thing in my life. To begin with, I have no rosary. I wish I had not read that French novel. I wish I had not gone downstairs to hunt for its seventeenth century ancestor. I wish I had given Pasquale dinner at the club. It is all the fault of Antoinette. Why can’t she cook in a middle-class, unedifying way? All this comes from having in the house a woman whose soul is in the stew-pot. CHAPTER VII July 1st. She has been now over five weeks under my roof, and I have put off the evil day of explaining her to Judith; and Judith returns to-morrow. I know it is odd for a philosophic bachelor to maintain in his establishment a young and detached female of prepossessing appearance. For the oddity I care not two pins. _Io son’ io_. But the question that exercises me occasionally is: In what category are my relations with Carlotta to be classified? I do not regard her as a daughter; still less as a sister: not even as a deceased wife’s sister. For a secretary she is too abysmally ignorant, too grotesquely incapable. What she knows would be made to kick the beam against the erudition of a guinea-pig. Yet she must be classified somehow. I must allude to her as something. At present she fills the place in the house of a pretty (and expensive) Persian cat; and like a cat she has made herself serenely at home.