“She wouldn’t run off with a good-for-nothing scamp of two-and-twenty?”

“Oh, no-o,” said Carlotta.  “She would not be so wicked.”

“I am glad,” said I, “that you think a sense of conjugal duty is an ineradicable element of female nature.  But suppose she fell in love with the young scamp?”

“Men fall in love,” she replied sagely.  “Women only fall in love in stories—­Turkish stories.  They love their husbands.”

“You amaze me,” said I.

Ye-es,” said Carlotta.

“But in England, a man wants a woman to love him before he marries her.”

“How can she?” asked Carlotta.

This was a staggering question.

“I don’t know,” said I, “but she dus.”

“Then before I marry a man in England I must love him?  But I shall die without a husband!”

“I don’t think so,” said I.

“I must begin soon,” said Carlotta, with a laugh.

A sinuous motion of her serpentine young body enabled her to bend her face down to mine.

“Shall I love Seer Marcous?  But how shall I know when I am in love?”

“When you appreciate the exceeding impropriety of discussing the matter with your humble servant,” I replied.

“When a girl is in love she does not speak about it?”

“No, my dear.  She lets concealment like a worm i’ the bud feed on her damask cheek.”

“Then she gets ugly?”

“That’s it,” I answered.  “You keep on looking in the glass, and when you perceive you are hideous then you’ll know you are in love.”

“But when I am so ugly you will not want me,” she objected.  “So it is no use falling in love with you.”

“You have a more logical mind than I imagined,” said I.

“What is a logical mind?” asked Carlotta.

“It is the antiseptic which destroys the bacilli of unreason whereby true happiness is vivified.”

“I do not understand,” she said.

“I should be vastly surprised if you did,” I laughed.

“Would you like me to marry and go away and leave you?” asked Carlotta, after a long pause.

“I suppose,” I said with a sigh, “that some tin-pot knight will drive up one of these days to the castle in a hansom-cab and carry off my princess.”

“Then you’ll be sorry?”

“My dear,” I answered, “do not let us discuss such gruesome things on an afternoon like this.”

“You would like better for me to go on playing at being your Turkish wife?”

“Infinitely,” said I.

Alas!  The day is sped.  I have asked the fleeting moment to tarry, and it laughed, and shook its gossamer wings at me, and flew by on its mad race into eternity.