“You hear what Sir Granite says?  He forbids our union.  If I married you without his consent, he would flay me alive, dip me in boiling oil and read me aloud his History of Renaissance Morals.  So I’m afraid it is no good.”

“Then I mustn’t marry him either?” asked Carlotta, looking at me.

“No!” I cried, “you are not going to marry anybody.  You seem to have hymenomania.  People don’t marry in this casual way in England.  They think over it for a couple of years and then they come together in a sober, God-fearing, respectable manner.”

“They marry at leisure and repent in haste,” interposed Pasquale.

“Precisely,” said I.

“What we call a marriage-bed repentance,” said Pasquale.

“I told you this poor child had no sense of humour,” I objected.

“You might as well kill yourself as marry without it.”

“You are not going to marry anybody, Carlotta,” said I, “until you can see a joke.”

“What is a joke?” inquired Carlotta.

“Mr. Pasquale asked you to marry him.  He didn’t mean it.  That was a joke.  It was enormously funny, and you should have laughed.”

“Then I must laugh when any one asks me to marry him?”

“As loud as you can,” said I.

“You are so strange in England,” sighed Carlotta.

I smiled, for I did not want to make her unhappy, and I spoke to her intelligibly.

“Well, well, when you have quite learned all the English ways, I’ll try and find you a nice husband.  Now you had better go to bed.”

She retired, quite consoled.  When the door closed behind her, Pasquale shook his head at me.

“Wasted!  Criminally wasted!”

“What?”

“That,” he answered, pointing to the door.  “That bundle of bewildering fascination.”

“That,” said I, “is an horrible infliction which only my cultivated sense of altruism enables me to tolerate.”

“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 oyster-shells, 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 middle-class, unedifying way?  All this comes from having in the house a woman whose soul is in the stew-pot.