“She is a perfect Spanish type.”
“Really?” asked the daughter referred to.
“Thoroughly.”
“Then I am happy.”
In the evening, after dinner, Cæsar again joined Mme. Dawson and began to talk with her. The Frenchwoman had a tendency to philosophize, to criticize, and to find out everything. She had no great capacity for admiration, and nothing she saw succeeded in dragging warm eulogies from her lips. There was none of the “bello! bellissimo!” of the Italian ladies in her talk, but a series of exact epithets.
Mme. Dawson had left all her capacity for admiration in France, and was visiting Italy for the purpose of arriving as soon as possible at the conclusion that there is no town like Paris, no nation like the French, and it didn’t matter much to Cæsar whether he agreed or denied it.
Mlle. de Sandoval had a great curiosity about things in Spain and an absurd idea about everything Spanish.
“It seems impossible,” thought Cæsar, “how stupid French people are about whatsoever is not French.”
Mlle. de Sandoval asked Cæsar a lot of questions, and finally, with an ironic gesture, said to him:
“You mustn’t let us keep you from going to talk with the Countess Brenda. She is looking over at you a great deal.”