ugh.

"What now?" I asked; for she had suspended the operation of arranging
her attire, and was gazing at me.

"It seems so odd," she replied, with her usual half-honest
half-insolent unreserve, "that you and I should now be so much on a
level, visiting in the same sphere; having the same connections."

"Why, yes," said I; "I had not much respect for the connections you
chiefly frequented awhile ago: Mrs. Cholmondeley and Co. would never
have suited me at all."

"Who _are_ you, Miss Snowe?" she inquired, in a tone of such
undisguised and unsophisticated curiosity, as made me laugh in my turn.

"You used to call yourself a nursery governess; when you first came
here you really had the care of the children in this house: I have seen
you carry little Georgette in your arms, like a bonne--few governesses
would have condescended so far--and now Madame Beck treats you with
more courtesy than she treats the Parisienne, St. Pierre; and that
proud chit, my cousin, makes you her bosom friend!"

"Wonderful!" I agreed, much amused at her mystification. "Who am I
indeed? Perhaps a personage in disguise. Pity I don't look the
character."

"I wonder you are not more flattered by all this," she went on; "you
take it with strange composure. If you really are the nobody I once
thought you, you must be a cool hand."

"The nobody you once thought me!" I repeated, and my face grew a little
hot; but I would not be angry: of what importance was a school-girl's
crude use of the terms nobody and somebody? I confined myself,
therefore, to the remark that I had merely met with civility; and asked
"what she saw in civility to throw the recipient into a fever of
confusion?"

"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 wou