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them, and said, He would be funnier if I hadn't, and
paraphrased, however wittily, Carlyle's ironical picture of a
nude court of St. James's, they would have punched my head under
the confused idea that I was trying to bamboozle them. Which
brings me to my point of departure, my remark to Judith as to the
futility of jesting to unpercipient ears.
I did not take up her retort.
And what was the end of the romance? I asked.
He borrowed twenty francs of me to pay for the _dejeuner_, and
his _l'annee trente_ delicacy of soul compelled him to blot my
existence forever from his mind.
He never repaid you? I asked.
For a humouristic philosopher, cried Judith, you are
delicious!
Judith is too fond of that word delicious. She uses it in
season and out of season.
We have the richest language that ever a people has accreted, and
we use it as if it were the poorest. We hoard up our infinite
wealth of words between the boards of dictionaries and in speech
dole out the worn bronze coinage of our vocabulary. We are the
misers of philological history. And when we can save our pennies
and pass the counterfeit coin of slang, we are as happy as if we
heard a blind beggar thank us for putting a pewter sixpence into
his hat.
I said something of the sort to Judith, after she had resumed her
seat and I had opened the window, the minstrel having wandered to
the next hostelry, where the process of converting Love's Sweet
Dream into a nightmare was still faintly audible. Judith looked
at me whimsically, as I stood breathing the comparatively fresh
air and enjoying the relative silence.
You are still the same, I am glad to see. Conversation with the
young savage from Syria hasn't altered you in the least.
In the first place, said I, savages do not grow in Syria; and
in the second, how could she have altered me?
If the heavens were to open and the New Jerusalem to appear this
moment before you, retorted Judith, with the relevant
irrelevance of her sex, you would begin an unconcerned
disquisition on the iconography of angels.
I sat on the sofa end and touched one of her little pink ears.
She has pretty ears. They were the first of things physical
about her that attracted me to her years ago in the Roman
pensionthey and the mass of silken flax that is her hair, and
her violet eyes.
Did you learn that particular way of talking in Paris? I asked.
She had the effrontery to say she was imitating me and that it

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