"I don't know what I'd better let you believe. Yes, on the whole, I think you may as well assume that I've got a husband," she concluded.

   "And a lover, too?" he asked.

   "Really! I like your impertinence!" she bridled.

   "I only asked to show a polite interest. I knew the answer would be an indignant negative. You're an Englishwoman, and you're

    nice

   . Oh, one can see with half an eye that you're

    nice

   . But that a nice Englishwoman should have a lover is as inconceivable as that she should have side-whiskers. It's only the reg'lar bad-uns in England who have lovers. There's nothing between the family pew and the divorce court. One nice Englishwoman is a match for the whole Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne."

   "To hear you talk, one might fancy you were not English yourself. For a man of the name of Field, you're uncommonly foreign. You

    look

   rather foreign, too, you

   know, by-the-bye. You haven't at all an English cast of countenance," she considered.

   "I've enjoyed the advantages of a foreign education. I was brought up abroad," he explained.

   "Where your features unconsciously assimilated themselves to a foreign type? Where you learned a hundred thousand strange little foreign things, no doubt? And imbibed a hundred thousand unprincipled little foreign notions? And all the ingenuous little foreign prejudices and misconceptions concerning England?" she questioned.

   "Most of them," he assented.

   "

    Perfide Albion?

   English hypocrisy?" she pursued.

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