I said, 'You must be the same age as my mamma, if she were alive.' I said other things, about her husband, which I forget.

Oh, I was very polite." She smiled up at me in quest of approbation.

I checked a horrified rebuke when I reflected that, according to the etiquette of the harem, she had been "very polite." But my poor Judith! Every artless question had been a knife thrust in a sensitive spot.

Her husband: the handsome blackguard who had lured her into the divorce court, married her, and after two unhappy years had left her broken; children: they would have kept her life sweet, and did I not know how she had yearned for them?
Her age: it is only the very happily married woman who snaps her fingers at the approach of forty, and even she does so with a disquieting sense of bravado.

And the sweet insolence of youth says: "I am eighteen: how old are you ?" My poor Judith! Once more, on our walk home, I discoursed to Carlotta on the differences between East and West.
"Seer Marcous," said Carlotta this evening at dinner--"I have decided now that she shall dine regularly with me; it is undoubtedly agreeable to see her pretty face on the opposite side of the table and listen to her irresponsible chatter: chatter which I keep within the bounds of decorum when Stenson is present, so as to save his susceptibilities, by the simple device, agreed upon between us (to her great delight) of scratching the side of my somewhat prominent nose--Seer Marcous, why does Mrs.Mainwaring keep your picture in her bedroom ?" I am glad Stenson happened to be out of the room.