"Just so! You English, wherever you are, always look out for your
English boors, your beer and _'bifstek'_; and when you come here,
instead of trying to learn something of the people you visit, and
pretend to study, you are guzzling and swearing, and smoking with one
another, and no wiser or more polished at the end of your travels than
if you had been all the time carousing in a booth at Greenwich."
He laughed sarcastically, and looked as if he could have poisoned me.
"There it is," said he, throwing the card on the table. "Take it or
leave it, just as you please. I suppose I shall have my trouble for my
pains; but it is not usual when a man such as I takes trouble, asks a
favor, and secures a privilege for an acquaintance, to treat him so."
This was astonishingly impertinent.
I was shocked, offended, penitent. I had possibly committed unwittingly
a breach of good breeding, according to French ideas, which almost
justified the brusque severity of the Marquis's undignified rebuke.
In a confusion, therefore, of many feelings, I hastened to make my
apologies, and to propitiate the chance friend who had showed me so much
disinterested kindness.
I told him that I would, at any cost, break through the engagement in
which I had unluckily entangled myself; that I had spoken with too
little reflection, and that I certainly had not thanked him at all in
proportion to his kindness, and to my real estimate of it.
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