Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/38

THE GOLDEN BOWL me. Such as I am—but you'll see for yourself. Say, however, I am a galantuomo—which I devoutly hope: I'm like a chicken, at best, chopped up and smothered in sauce; cooked down as a crême de volaille, with half the parts left out. Your father's the natural fowl running about the bassecour. His feathers, his movements, his sounds—those are the parts that, with me, are left out."

"Ah as a matter of course—since you can't eat a chicken alive!"

The Prince hadn't been annoyed at this, but had been positive. "Well, I'm eating your father alive—which is the only way to taste him. I want to continue, and as it's when he talks American that he is most alive, so I must also cultivate it, to get my pleasure. He couldn't make one like him so much in any other language."

It mattered little that the girl had continued to demur—it was the mere play of her joy. "I think he could make you like him in Chinese."

"It would be an unnecessary trouble. What I mean is that he's a kind of result of his inevitable tone. My liking is accordingly for the tone—which has made him possible."

"Oh you'll hear enough of it," she laughed, "before you've done with us."

Only this in truth had made him frown a little. "What do you mean, please, by my having 'done' with you?"

"Why found out about us all there is to find."

He had been able to take it indeed easily as a joke. "Ah love, I began with that. I know enough, I feel, 8