"Je vis dans un trou! I inhabit a den, miss—a cavern, where you would not put your dainty nose. Once, with base shame of speaking the whole truth, I talked about my 'study' in that college: know now that this 'study' is my whole abode; my chamber is there and my drawing-room. As for my 'establishment of servants'" (mimicking my voice) "they number ten; les voilà."
And he grimly spread, close under my eyes, his ten fingers.
"I black my boots", pursued he, savagely. "I brush my paletôt".
"No, monsieur, it is too plain; you never do that", was my parenthesis.
"Je fais mon lit et mon ménage; I seek my dinner in a restaurant; my supper takes care of itself; I pass days laborious and loveless; nights long and lonely; I am ferocious, and bearded, and monkish; and nothing now living in this world loves me, except some old hearts worn like my own, and some few beings, impoverished, suffering, poor in purse and in spirit, whom the kingdoms of this world own not, but to whom a will and testament not to be disputed, has bequeathed the kingdom of heaven".
"Ah, monsieur; but I know!"
"What do you know? many things, I verily believe; yet not me, Lucy!"
"I know that you have a pleasant old house in a pleasant old square of the Basse-Ville—why don't you go and live there?"
"Hein?" muttered he again.
"I liked it much, monsieur; with the steps ascending to the door, the gray flags in front, the nodding trees behind—real trees, not shrubs—trees dark, high, and of old growth. And the boudoir-oratoire—you should make that room your study; it is so quiet and solemn".
He eyed me closely; he half-smiled, half-colored. "Where did you pick up all that? Who told you?" he asked.
"Nobody told me. Did I dream it, monsieur, do you think?"
"Can I enter into your visions? Can I guess a woman's waking thoughts, much less her sleeping fantasies?"
"If I dreamt it, I saw in my dream human beings as well as a house. I saw a priest, old, bent, and gray, and a domestic—old, too, and picturesque; and a lady, splendid but strange; her head would scarce reach to my elbow—her
