Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/116

 that those who are in honor wholly shipwrecked will yet very often cling desperately to one stray spar of virtue."

He could tell her hand had raised to the knocker on the closed door. "Mr. Vanringham, will you answer me a question?"

"A thousand. (So I am Vanringham.")

"I have not knocked. I possess, as you know, a considerable fortune in my own right. It would be easy for a strong man—and, sure, your shoulders are prodigiously broad, Mr. Cut-throat!—very easy for him to stifle my cries and carry me away, even now. And then, to preserve my honor, I would have no choice save to marry that broad-shouldered man. Is this not truth?"

"It is the goddess herself, newly stolen from her well. O dea certé!"

"I am not absolutely hideous, either?" she queried, absent-mindedly.

"Dame Venus," Kennaston observed, "may have made a similar demand of the waves at Cythera when she first rose among their billows: and I doubt not that the white foaming waters, amor