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 chin, especially when you're looking away from a poor wench!"

"Taking it by and large, you're hard on the King's English."

"Taking it by and large, as you really don't, mine's better than yours. I never pretended it was the King's anyhow; didn't we revolt for the privilege of talking as we damn pleased! Besides, I am the canned milk Scantleberries, not to mention the rubber roofing Marples, and it's an age of commerce which the poor old aesthetic Thanets couldn't buck the tide of, and all died out bar you, and sometimes I think you're dying out, and I'll use any grammar I like, even in Back Bay,—in fact, especially in Back Bay. If Dad leaves me his rubber when he dies I'm going to buy up the whole Subjunctive Mood and put it in the British Museum where you can't do a thing but look at it. . . That's what's the matter with you: instead of saying frankly, 'I'll take beer,' you say, 'Oh, to be a lily-pad!' You're a prisstail."

"A what!"

"Prisstail. It's a word I'm making up to describe you, since no word that exists, will."

"You've wandered from the point, which was old maids."

"Prisstail's not so far! . . . If old maids are vague and sweet to boys whose cheek goes from their eye to their chin as nicely as yours does, it's for reasons that would shock the daylights out of them if they