Bah! are those your Paris courtesies ?" "Forgive me, ma belle! I thought you called yourself our comrade, and would have no 'fine manners.' There is no knowing how to please you." He might have pleased her simply and easily enough, if he had only looked up with a shade of interest to that most picturesque picture, bright as a pastel portrait, that was hung above him in the old tumble-down Moorish stonework.

But his thoughts were with other things; and a love scene with this fantastic little Amazon did not attract him.
The warm, ripe, mellow little wayside cherry hung directly in his path, with the sun on its bloom, and the free wind tossing it merrily; but it had no charm for him.

He was musing rather on that costly, delicate, brilliant-hued, hothouse blossom that could only be reached down by some rich man's hand, and grew afar on heights where never winter chills, nor summer tan, could come too rudely on it.
"Come, tell me what is Marquise ?--a kitten ?" he went on, leaning his arm still on the sill of her embrasure, and willing to coax her out of her anger.
"A kitten!" echoed Cigarette contemptuously.

"You think me a child, I suppose ?" "Surely you are not far off it ?" "Mon Dieu! why, I was never a child in my life," retorted Cigarette, waxing sunny-tempered and confidential again, while she perched herself, like some gay-feathered mockingbird on a branch, on the window-sill itself.

"When I was two, I used to be beaten; when I was three, I used to scrape up the cigar ends the officers dropped about, to sell them again for a bit of black bread; when I was four, I knew all about Philippe Durron's escape from Beylick, and bit my tongue through, to say nothing, when my mother flogged me with a mule-whip, because I would not tell, that she might tell again at the Bureau and get the reward.