Page:Varia.djvu/80

 68 my bedroom door, and I know that when I go to breakfast in the morning Brocconi will be sitting there, waiting for his prey. I know that when I come back from breakfast Brocconi will be still sitting there, and that I can never leave my room without seeing him in unquestioned and ostentatious attendance upon me. He stands up, hat in hand, to salute me, every time I pass him; and after a while I take to lurking, I might almost say to skulking within my chamber, rather than encounter his disappointed and reproachful gaze. With the natural tendency of a woman to temporize, I buy my freedom one day by engaging his services for the next. If he will permit me to go alone and in peace to the Greek theatre, to sit on the grassy hill amid the wild flowers, to look at the charming view and breathe the delicious air for a long, lazy afternoon, I will drive with him the following morning over the dusty glaring road to Fort Euryelus, and be marched submissively through the endless intricacies of its subterranean corridors, and have every tiresome detail pointed out to me and explained with merciless prolixity.

On the same lamentably weak principle, I