CHAPTER VIIII
tell
you, Bon Ami, that you are foolish.”
“And I tell you, Vittoria, that you are beautiful.”
This is what the two were saying to each other when Jasper looked through the door of the Hôtel Bomboni. It was an edifying and delightfully novel conversation.
“I am fairly good-looking, perhaps pretty,” she admitted, glancing round lazily at the fly-blown mirror behind the bar, and adjusting the comb in her hair so that it came a millionth of an inch nearer the centre; “but beautiful? That’s different.”
“It is my trade to be nice in the use of the English language,” replied Bunny. “I state a fact accurately by saying that you are beautiful.”
“It’s too hot to quarrel. Suppose it is so. What then?”
“There is no ‘then,’ ” said Bunny. “Beauty is its own completion.”
“So, for a
