That day on returning home I found Therese looking out for me, a very unusual occurrence of late.  She handed me a card bearing the name of the Marquis de Villarel.

“How did you come by this?” I asked.  She turned on at once the tap of her volubility and I was not surprised to learn that the grandee had not done such an extraordinary thing as to call upon me in person.  A young gentleman had brought it.  Such a nice young gentleman, she interjected with her piously ghoulish expression.  He was not very tall.  He had a very smooth complexion (that woman was incorrigible) and a nice, tiny black moustache.  Therese was sure that he must have been an officer en las filas legitimas.  With that notion in her head she had asked him about the welfare of that other model of charm and elegance, Captain Blunt.  To her extreme surprise the charming young gentleman with beautiful eyes had apparently never heard of Blunt.  But he seemed very much interested in his surroundings, looked all round the hall, noted the costly wood of the door panels, paid some attention to the silver statuette holding up the defective gas burner at the foot of the stairs, and, finally, asked whether this was in very truth the house of the most excellent Senora Dona Rita de Lastaola.  The question staggered Therese, but with great presence of mind she answered the young gentleman that she didn’t know what excellence there was about it, but that the house was her property, having been given to her by her own sister.  At this the young gentleman looked both puzzled and angry, turned on his heel, and got back into his fiacre.  Why should people be angry with a poor girl who had never done a single reprehensible thing in her whole life?

“I suppose our Rita does tell people awful lies about her poor sister.”  She sighed deeply (she had several kinds of sighs and this was the hopeless kind) and added reflectively, “Sin on sin, wickedness on wickedness!  And the longer she lives the worse it will be.  It would be better for our Rita to be dead.”

I told “Mademoiselle Therese” that it was really impossible to tell whether she was more stupid or atrocious; but I wasn’t really very much shocked.  These outbursts did not signify anything in Therese.  One got used to them.  They were merely the expression of her rapacity and her righteousness; so that our conversation ended by my asking her whether she had any dinner ready for me that evening.

“What’s the good of getting you anything to eat, my dear young Monsieur,” she quizzed me tenderly.  “You just only peck like a little bird.  Much better let me save the money for you.”  It will show the super-terrestrial nature of my misery when I say that I was quite surprised at Therese’s view of my appetite.  Perhaps she was right.  I certainly did not know.  I stared hard at her and in the end she admitted that the dinner was in fact ready that very moment.