“I’ve never read a Spanish novel unless you count Don Quixote and I’m certain you haven’t. What’s he do?”

“My dear, everything. Rages and despairs and sends frightful letters by special messenger. I got a stinker this morning, à cause de — well, à cause de something that really is a bit daffy.”

She halted and inhaled deeply. Carlisle remembered the confidences that Félicité had poured out in her convent days, concerning what she called her “raves.” There had been the music master who had fortunately snubbed Félicité and the medical student who hadn’t. There had been the brothers of the other girls and an actor whom she attempted to waylay at a charity matinée. There had been a male medium, engaged by Lord Pastern during his spiritualistic period, and a dietician — Carlisle pulled herself together and listened to the present recital. It appeared that there was a crisis: a crise as Félicité called it. She used far more occasional French than her mother and was fond of laying her major calamities at the door of Gallic temperament.

“ — and as a matter of fact,” Félicité was saying, “I hadn’t so much as smirked at another soul, and there he was seizing me by the wrists and giving me that shattering sort of look that begins at your boots and travels up to your face and then makes the return trip. And breathing loudly, don’t you know, through the nose. I don’t deny that the first time was rather fun. But after he got wind of old Edward it really was, and I may say still is, beyond a joke. And now to crown everything, there’s the crise.”

“But what crisis? You haven’t said — ”

For the first time Félicité looked faintly embarrassed.

“He found a letter,” she said. “In my bag. Yesterday.”

“You aren’t going to tell me he goes fossicking in your bag? And what letter, for pity’s sake? Honestly, Fée!”