"Happy man! Tell me something about it. What were they doing? Oh, for an hour of the boulevard!"
"They were doing about what they are always doing,—amusing themselves a good deal."
"At the theatres, eh?" sighed the Countess. "At the cafés-concerts, at the little tables in front of the doors? Quelle existence! You know I am a Parisienne, monsieur," she added, "to my finger-tips."
"Miss Spencer was mistaken, then," I ventured to rejoin, "in telling me that you are a Provençale."
She stared a moment, then she put her nose to her embroidery, which had a dingy, desultory aspect. "Ah, I am a Provençale by birth; but I am a Parisienne by—inclination."
"And by experience, I suppose?" I said.
She questioned me a moment with her hard little eyes. "Oh, experience! I could talk of experience if I wished. I never expected, for example, that experience had this in store for me." And she pointed with her bare elbow, and with a jerk of her head, at everything that surrounded her,—at the little white house, the quince-tree, the rickety paling, even at Mr. Mixter.
"You are in exile!" I said, smiling.
"You may imagine what it is! These two years that I have been here I have passed hours—hours! One gets used to things, and sometimes I think I have got used to this. But there are some things that are always beginning over again. For example, my coffee."
