that is----"

Vanno laughed. "If you put it in that way, I don't. No, if _we_ were on
our honeymoon I couldn't tolerate a third, if it were an angel. But it
seems as if every one must want you."

"Hush! People will hear you."

Just then a party of three Englishwomen rose, and descended from the
tram to go to a villa in the Avenue de la Vigie. This exodus left a
vacancy opposite the Winters.

"Shall we move over there, before the tram gets going too fast?" Mary
suggested. "I feel Mrs. Winter would like to talk to us."

Vanno agreed. He was anxious for the invitation to be renewed. And in a
few moments after they had begun talking to the Winters across the
narrow aisle, his wish was granted. Rose told her husband that she had
asked Mary to stay with them, and ordered him to urge the suggestion.

"You see," Rose confided to her opposite neighbours, leaning far
forward, her elbows on her knees, "I always try to have some perfectly
charming person in our one little spare room, while the 'high season' is
on, or else the most terrible bores beg us to take them in. People like
that seem to think you have a house or an apartment on the Riviera for
the sole purpose of putting them up for a fortnight or so. It's
positively weakening! We've just got rid of an appalling young man, whom
my husband asked out of sheer pity: a schoolmaster, who'd come here for
his health and inadvertently turned gambler. At first he won. He used to
haunt my tea-parties, which, as we're idiotically good-natured, are
often half made up of criminals and frumps. Extraordinarily congenial
they are, too! The criminals are flattered to meet the frumps, and the
frumps find the criminals thrilling. This was one of our male frumps:
like an owl, with neglige eyebrows, and quite mad, round eyes behind
convex glasses. He used to shed gold plaques out of his clothes on to my
floor, because whenever he won he was in the habit of tucking the piece
down his collar lest he should be tempted to risk it on the tables
again. But at last there were no more gold pieces to shed, and his eyes
got madder and rounder. And then St. George invited him to stay with us,
in order that I might reform him. I did try, for I _was_ sorry for the
creature: he seemed so like one of one's own pet weaknesses, come alive.
But after he threatened to take poison at the luncheon table, my husband
thought it too hard on my nerves. I began to get so thin that my veils
didn't fit; and George se