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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
oystershells, 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
middleclass, unedifying way? All this comes from having in the
house a woman whose soul is in the stewpot.
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
tomorrow.
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 guineapig. 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 fatchecked 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,
strongminded. She replied that she made a professional
specialty of these qualities, one of her present pupils being a
young lady of the Alhambra ballet who desires the particular
shade of cultivation that will match a new brougham. She teaches

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