Page:The sleeping beauty and other fairy tales from the old French (1910).djvu/150

Beauty and the Beast to her chagrin the lights went out almost at once and the theatre was dark again. Still it had been very pleasant, and she promised herself to become a constant playgoer.

That evening when the Beast paid his visit, she told him all about the comedy. 'Eh? You like that sort of thing, do you?' asked the monster. 'Well, you shall have as much of it as you like. You are so pretty.' Beauty could not help smiling inwardly at his clumsy compliments. But she smiled no longer when he put to her once again his blunt question:—

Beauty, will you be my wife?'

'No, Beauty,' she answered as before; but she was really beginning to get frightened, he was so gentle and so persistent. She sat up so long thinking over this that it was almost daylight before she closed her eyes in bed; and at once, as if impatient at being kept waiting, the lover of her dreams presented himself. Perhaps for this reason he was not in the best of tempers; at any rate he taxed her with being moody and discontented.

'I should be happy enough,' she answered, if 110