Her conduct has been exemplary.  I have allowed her to make the acquaintance of two or three young fellows, her partners at the Casino dances, and she walks up and down the terrace with them before meals.  I have forbidden her, under penalty of immediate return to London and of my eternal displeasure, to mention the harem at Alexandretta.  Young fellows are gifted with a genius for misapprehension.  She is an ordinary young English lady, an orphan (which is true), and I am her guardian.  Of course she looks at them with imploring eyes, and pulls them by the sleeve, and handles the lappels of their coats, and admits them to terms of the frankest intimacy; but I can no more change these characteristics than I can alter the shape of her body.  She is the born coquette.  Her delighted conception of herself is that she is the object of every man’s admiration.  I noticed her this morning playing a tune with her fingers on the old bathing-man’s arm, as he was preparing to take her into the water, and I saw his mahogany face soften.  In her indescribable childish way she would coquet with a tax-collector or a rag-and-bone man or the Archbishop of Canterbury.  But she has committed no grave indiscretion, and I am sufficiently her lord and master to exact obedience.

I pretend, however, to be at her beck and call, and it is a delight to minister to her radiant happiness—­to feel her lean on my arm and hear her cooing voice say: 

“You are so good.  I should like to kiss you.”

But I do not allow her to kiss me.  Never again.

“Seer Marcous, let us go to the little horses.”

She has a consuming passion for petits chevaux.  I speak sagely of the evils of gambling.  She laughs.  I weakly take lower ground.

“What is the good?  You have no money.”

“Oh-h!  But only two francs,” she says, holding out her hand.

“Not one.  Yesterday you lost.”

“But to-day I shall win.  I want to give you something I saw in a shop.  Oh, a beautiful thing.”  Then I feel a hand steal into the pocket of my dinner jacket where I carry loose silver for this very purpose, just as a lover of horses carries lumps of sugar for the nose of a favourite pony, and immediately it is withdrawn with a cry of joy and triumph, and she skips back out of my reach.  Then she takes my arm and leads me from the sweet night-air into the hot little room with its crowd around the nine gyrating animals.

“I shall put it on 5.  I always put on 5.  He is a nice, clean, white, pretty horse.”

She stakes two francs, watches the turn in a tense agony of excitement; she wins, comes running to me with sixteen francs clutched tight in her hand.

“See.  I said I should win.”

“Come away then and be happy.”

But she makes a protesting grimace, and before I can stop her, runs back to stake again on 5.  In twenty minutes she is ruined and returns to me wearing an expression of abject misery.  She is too desolate even to try the fortune of the dinner-jacket pocket.  I take her outside and restore her to beatitude with grenadine syrup and soda-water.  She rejects the straws.  With her elbows on the marble table, the glass held in both hands, she drinks sensuously, in little sips.