If you have a single feminine folly, you will enjoy this more than you
will own. If you are, as they complain, absolutely faultless, you will
enjoy with me the pleasure of the girls in plaguing one after another
all the traders of Altasfe:" and with these words I placed in her
hands a packet of the thin metallic plates constituting their
currency. Her extreme and unaffected surprise was amusing to witness.
"What am I to do with this?" she inquired, counting carefully the
uncounted pile, in a manner which at once dispelled my impression that
her surprise was due to childish ignorance of its value.
"Whatever you please, Madonna; whatever can please you and the
others."
"But," she remonstrated, "this is more than all our dowries for
another year to come; and--forgive me for repeating what you seem
purposely to forget--I cannot cast the shadow between my equals and
the master. Would you so mortify _me_ as to make me take from Eunane's
hand, for example, what should come from yours?"
"You are right, Madonna, now as always," I owned; wincing at the name
she used, invariably employed by the others, but one I never endured
from her.
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