“I suppose I’m getting to be a philosopher, too,” said Carlotta, “and I hate it!  Sometimes I think I hate everything and everybody —­save you, Seer Marcous, darling.  It’s wicked of me.  I must have been born wicked.  But I used to be happy.  I never wanted to go to dream-cities.  I was just like a cat.  Like Polyphemus.  Do you remember Polyphemus?”

“Yes,” said I. And then set off my balance by this strange conversation with Carlotta, I added:  “I killed him.”

She turned a startled face to me.

“You killed him?  Why?”

“He laughed at me because I was unhappy,” said I.

“Through me?”

“Yes; through you.  But that’s neither here nor there.  We were not discussing the death of Polyphemus.  We were talking about being philosophers, and you said that as a philosopher you hated everything and everybodyexcept me.  Why do you exclude me, Carlotta?”

We were riding so near together that my leg rubbed her saddle-girth.  I looked hard at her.  She turned away her head and put the pantomime parasol between us.  I heard a little choking sob.

“Let us get off—­and sit down a little—­I want to cry.

“The end of all feminine philosophy,” I said, somewhat brutally.  “No.  It’s getting late.  That’s only Mogador in front of us.  Let us go to it.”

Carlotta shifted her parasol quickly.

“What has happened to you, Seer Marcous?  You have never spoken to me like that before.”

“The very deuce seems to have happened,” said I, angrily—­though why I should have felt angry, heaven only knows.  “First you turn yourself into a Royal Academy picture with that unspeakable umbrella of yours and the trumpery blue sky and sunshine, and make my sentimental soul ache; and then you—­”

“It’s a very pretty umbrella,” said Carlotta, looking upwards at it demurely.

“Give it to me,” I said.

She yielded it with her usual docility.  I cast it upon the desert.  Being open it gave one or two silly rebounds, then lay still.  Carlotta reined up her mule.

“Oh-h!” she said, in her old way.

I dismounted hurriedly, and helped her down and passed my arm through the two bridles.

“My dear child,” said I, “what is the meaning of all this?  Here we have been living for months the most tranquil and unruffled existence, and now suddenly you begin to talk about dream-cities and the impossibility of getting there, and I turn angry and heave parasols about Africa.  What is the meaning of it?”

The most extraordinary part of it was that I should be treating Carlotta as a grown-up woman, after the fashion of the hero of a modern French novel.  Perhaps I was younger than I thought.

She kept her eyes fixed downward.

“Why are you angry with me?” she asked in a low voice.

“I haven’t the remotest idea,” said I.

She lifted her eyelids slowly—­oh, very, very slowly, glanced quiveringly at me, while the shadow of a smile fluttered round her lips.  I verily believe the baggage exulted in her feminine heart.  I turned away, leading the two animals, and picked up the parasol which I closed and restored to her.