‘Strange or not!’

. . . .  Chillon thought he had said sufficient.  She was under his protectorship, otherwise he would not have alluded to the observance of class distinctions.  He felt them personally in this case because of their seeming to stretch grotesquely by the pretentious heterodoxy of the young fellow, whom, nevertheless, thinking him over now that he was mentioned, he approved for his manliness in bluntly telling his origin and status.

A chalet supplied them with fresh milk, and the inn of a village on a perch with the midday meal.  Their appetites were princely and swept over the little inn like a conflagration.  Only after clearing it did they remember the rearward pedestrian, whose probable wants Chillon was urged by Carthinia to speak of to their host.  They pushed on, clambering up, scurrying down, tramping gaily, till by degrees the chambers of Carinthia’s imagination closed their doors and would no longer intercommunicate.  Her head refused to interest her, and left all activity to her legs and her eyes, and the latter became unobservant, except of foot-tracks, animal-like.  She felt that she was a fine machine, and nothing else:  and she was rapidly approaching those ladies!

‘You will tell them how I walked with you,’ she said.

‘Your friends over yonder?’ said he.

‘So that they may not think me so ignorant, brother.’  She stumbled on the helpless word in a hasty effort to cloak her vanity.

He laughed.  Her desire to meet the critical English ladies with a towering reputation in one department of human enterprise was comprehensible, considering the natural apprehensiveness of the half-wild girl before such a meeting.  As it often happens with the silly phrases of simple people, the wrong word, foolish although it was, went to the heart of the hearer and threw a more charitable light than ridicule on her.  So that they may know I can do something they cannot do, was the interpretation.  It showed her deep knowledge of her poorness in laying bare the fact.

Anxious to cheer her, he said:  ’Come, come, you can dance.  You dance well, mother has told me, and she was a judge.  You ride, you swim, you have a voice for country songs, at all events.  And you’re a bit of a botanist too.  You’re good at English and German; you had a French governess for a couple of years.  By the way, you understand the use of a walking-stick in self-defence:  you could handle a sword on occasion.’

‘Father trained me,’ said Carthinia.  ‘I can fire a pistol, aiming.’

’With a good aim, too.  Father told me you could.  How fond he was of his girl!  Well, bear in mind that father was proud of you, and hold up your head wherever you are.’

‘I will,’ she said.

He assured her he had a mind to have a bugle blown at the entrance of the Baths for a challenge to the bathers to match her in warlike accomplishments.

She bit her lips:  she could not bear much rallying on the subject just then: