red, 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.

A governess, a fat-checked girl, who I am afraid takes too humorous
a view of the position, comes of mornings to instruct Carlotta in the
rudiments of education. When engaging Miss Griggs, I told her she must
be patient, firm and, above all, strong-minded. She replied that she
made a professional specialty of these qual