Already I have endured more than enough in the interests of this damsel.

I have ridden from Paris, and that means close upon a week in the saddle--no little thing to a man who has acquired certain habits of life and developed a taste for certain minor comforts which he is very reluctant to forgo.

I have fed and slept at inns, living on the worst of fares and sleeping on the hardest, and hardly the cleanest, of beds.

Ventregris! Figure to yourself that last night we lay at Luzan, in the only inn the place contained--a hovel, Monsieur le Seneschal, a hovel in which I would not kennel a dog I loved." His face flushed, and his voice rose as he dwelt upon the things he had undergone.
"My servant and I slept in a dormitory'-- a thousand devils! monsieur, in a dormitory! Do you realize it?
We had for company a drunken vintner, a pedlar, a pilgrim on his way to Rome, and two peasant women; and they sent us to bed without candles, for modesty's sake.

I ask you to conceive my feelings in such a case as that.