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situation. I think I only succeeded in giving her the impression
that I was in a bad temper. So much did I sympathise with Harry
that I forbore to acquaint her with the fact that he was a
married man when he enticed her away from Alexandretta.
Sebastian Pasquale dined with me this evening. Antoinette,
forgetful of idolatrous practices, devoted the concentration of
her being to the mysteries of her true religion. The excellence
of the result affected Pasquale so strongly that with his
customary disregard of convention he insisted on Antoinette being
summoned to receive his congratulations. He rose, made her a bow
as if she were a Marquise of prerevolutionary days.
It is a meal, said he, bunching up his fingers to his mouth and
kissing them open, that one should have taken not sitting, but
kneeling.
You stole that from Heine, said I, when the enraptured creature
had gone, and you gave it out to Antoinette as if it were your
own.
My good Ordeyne, said he, did you ever hear of a man giving
anything authentic to a woman?
You know much more about the matter than I do, I replied, and
Pasquale laughed.
It has been a pleasure to see him againa creature of abounding
vitality whom time cannot alter. He is as lithelimbed as when
he was a boy, and as lithewitted. I don't know how his
consciousness could have arrived at appreciation of Antoinette's
cooking, for he talked all through dinner, giving me an account
of his mirific adventures in foreign cities. Among other things,
he had been playing juvenile lead, it appears, in the comic opera
of Bulgarian politics. I also heard of the Viennese dancer. My
own little chronicle, which he insisted on my unfolding, compared
with his was that of a caged canary compared with a
sparrowhawk's. Besides, I am not so expansive as Pasquale, and
on certain matters I am silent. He also gesticulates freely, a
thing which is totally foreign to my nature. As Judith would
say, he has a temperament. His moustaches curl fiercely upward
until the points are nearly on a level with his flashing dark
eyes. Another point of dissimilarity between us is that he seems
to have been poured molten into his clothes, whereas mine hang as
from pegs clumsily arranged about my person. By no conceivable
freak of outer circumstance could I have the adventures of
Pasquale.
And yet he thinks them tame! Lord! If I found myself hatching
conspiracies in Sofia on a nest made of loaded revolvers, I
should feel that the wild whirl of Bedlam had broken loose around
me.

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