"Well, when——" He coughed and looked round at them coyly. "This is really rather a delicate subject."
"Not at all," murmured Hyacinth.
"Well, it's like this. When an enchanter wants to annoy you he generally turns you into an animal of some kind."
Belvane achieved her first blush since she was seventeen.
"It is a humorous way they have," she said.
"But suppose you really were an animal altogether, it wouldn't annoy you at all. An elephant isn't annoyed at being an elephant; he just tries to be a good elephant, and he'd be miserable if he couldn't do things with his trunk. The annoying thing is to look like an elephant, to have the very complicated—er—inside of an elephant, and yet all the time really to be a man."
They were all intensely interested. Woggs thought that it was going to lead up to a revelation of what sort of animal Prince Udo really was, but in this she was destined to be disappointed. After all there were advantages in Udo's present position. As a man he had never been listened to so attentively.
"Now suppose for a moment I am a lion. I have the—er—delicate apparatus of a lion, but the beautiful thoughts and aspirations of a Prince. Thus there is one—er—side of me which craves for raw beef, but none the less there is a higher side of me" (he brought his paw up towards his heart), "which—well, you know how you'd feel about it yourself."
The Princess shuddered.
"I should," she said, with conviction.