I had taught
her last night a few substitutes in the softest tongue I knew for
those words of natural tenderness in which her language is signally
deficient: taught her to understand them, certainly not to use them,
for it was long before I could even induce her to address me by name.
"My father bade me yesterday," she said at last, "ask you in future to
wear the dress of our people. Not that you will be the less an object
of attention and wonder, but that in retaining a distinction which
depends entirely on your own choice, you will seem intentionally to
prefer your own habits to ours."
"I comply of course," I observed. "Naturally the dress of every
country is best suited to its own conditions. Yet I should have
thought that a preference for my own world, even were it wholly
irrational, might seem at least natural and pardonable."
"People don't," she answered simply, "like any sign of individual
fancy or opinion. They don't like any one to show that he thinks them
wrong even on a matter of taste."
"I fear, then, _carissima_, that I must be content with unpopularity.
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