ld 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 Crecy. "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."

"Do--_do_ tell me who you are? I'll not repeat it," she urged, adhering
with ludicrous tenacity to the wise notion of an incognito she had got
hold of; and she squeezed the arm of which she had now obtained full
possession, and coaxed and conjured till I was obliged to pause in the
park to laugh. Throughout our walk she rang the most fanciful changes
on this theme; proving, by her obstinate credulity, or incredulity, her
incapacity to conceive how any person not bolstered up by birth or
wealth, not supported by some consciousness of name or connection,
could maintain an attitude of reasonable integrity. As for me, it quite
sufficed to my mental tranquillity that I was known where it imported
that known I should be; the rest sat on me easily: pedigree, social
position, and recondite intellectual acquisition, occupied about the
same space and place in my interests and thoughts; they were my
third-class lodgers--to whom could be assigned only the small
sitting-room and the little back bedroom: even if the dining and
drawing-rooms stood empty, I never confessed it to them, as