"But I want to know whether you are coming to dinner, that I may arrange my cooking accordingly."
In Bessy's house the custom seemed to prevail for the mistress to dine six days of the week with Duke Humphrey, and then on the seventh, her at-home day, to make a great parade before her guests.
I was now running into the very centre of danger.
I could not possibly back out of this engagement.
"A serious business, eh?" I know it was serious enough to me.
An ideal of my youth, and lovelier now than ever, with a husband of her own too, and that husband a fine manly fellow. So far from being jealous, he had openly entrusted me with the consolation of his sorrowing spouse. And I am the last person in the world to be enrolled in the Order of Anchorites.
I candidly admit that I am not a bit better than my neighbours.
So I tricked myself out finely. I put on my new coffee-coloured clothes with the antique buttons; I neatly tied my embroidered cravat; I drew on my Kordofan-leather boots with the silver spurs; I fastened a crane's plume in my new spiral hat.
This was the audacious fashion of the year, and within a twelvemonth this costume was worn in the whole kingdom. And after that, I went to the barber's and he twisted my thick blonde hair into masterly ringlets. Aggravating circumstances, the whole lot of them!
How my heart beat when I set forth on my expedition!
On the way from my dwelling to Bessy's lodgings my ill fate brought me face to face with all the veteran actresses of the National Theatre, and they all stopped me and asked where I was going. They all remarked that I was very stylishly got up, and they all shook their fingers at me, and said: "Fie, fie! you straw-widower!"
The devil must really have been in me to make me take the trouble to have my hair so prettily frizzled.
I was just about to dash hastily up the staircase of Bessy's dwelling, when whom should I run into but Tóni Sági. It only needed that. He came from the same town as I did, was a common friend of all my friends, and was about as reticent of news as a town-crier.
"Your servant, friend! Why, you're quite a stranger. I've just come from Bessy. The young lady is in a very bad humour. She as good as pitched me out of doors. She must be expecting some one. Perhaps you are the very man, eh?"