We stepped over the low iron rail, and passing through the first two rows of people, found seats behind where the crowd was thinner.

“Is Seer Marcous still angry with me?” asked Carlotta, and the simple plaintiveness of her voice would have melted the bust of Nero.  I lectured her on cruelty to animals.  That one had duties of kindness towards the lower creation appealed to her as a totally new idea.  Supposing the dog had broken all its legs and ribs, would she not have been sorry?  She answered frankly in the negative.  It was a nasty little dog.  If she had hurt it badly, so much the better.  What did it matter if a dog was hurt?  She was sorry now she had hurled it into space, because it belonged to my friends, and that had made me cross with her.

Of course I was shocked at the thoughtless cruelty of the action; but my anger had also its roots in dismay at the public scandal it might have caused, and in the discovery that I was known to the victim’s owner.  It is the sad fate of the instructors of youth that they must hypocritically credit themselves with only the sublimest of motives.  I spoke to Carlotta like the good father in the “Swiss Family Robinson.”  I gave vent to such noble sentiments that in a quarter of an hour I glowed with pride in my borrowed plumes of virtue.  I would have taken a slug to my bosom and addressed a rattlesnake as Uncle Toby did the fly.  I wonder whether it is not through some such process as this that parsons manage to keep themselves good.

The soothing warmth of conscious merit restored me to good temper; and when Carlotta slid her hand into mine and asked me if I had forgiven her, I magnanimously assured her that all the past was forgotten.

“Only,” said I, “you will have to get out of this habit of tears.  A wise man called Burton says in his ‘Anatomy of Melancholy,’ a beautiful book which I’ll give you to read when you are sixty, ’As much count may be taken of a woman weeping as a goose going barefoot.’”

“He was a nasty old man,” said Carlotta.  “Women cry because they feel very unhappy.  Men are never unhappy, and that is the reason that men don’t cry.  My mamma used to cry all the time at Alexandretta; but Hamdi!—­” she broke into an adorable trill of a chuckle, “You would as soon see a goose going with boots and stockings, like the Puss in the shoes —­the fairy tale—­as Hamdi crying. Hou!”

Half an hour later, as we were driving homewards, she broke a rather long silence which she had evidently been employing in meditation.

“Seer Marcous.”

“Yes?”

She has a child’s engaging way of rubbing herself up against one when she wants to be particularly ingratiating.

“It was so nice to dine with you on Saturday.”

“Really?”

“Oh, ye-es.  When are you going to let me dine with you again, to show me you have forgiven me?”

A hansom cab offers peculiar facilities for the aforesaid process of ingratiation.