The Mistress.] "And holding her tongue the last, and modesty the day after never at all."
Marion.] "Alack! Talk of my tongue. But I say no more. She, under whose wing I live, now deals the blow. I'm sped—'tis but a chambermaid gone. Catch what's left on't," and she staggered and sank backwards on to the handsomest fellow in the room, which happened to be Gerard.
"Tic! tic!" cried he, peevishly, "there, don't be stupid! that is too heavy a jest for me. See you not I am talking to the mistress?"
Marion resumed her elasticity with a grimace; made two little bounds into the middle of the floor and there turned a pirouette. "There, mistress," said she, "I give in, 'tis you that reigns supreme with the men; leastways with male children."
"Young man," said the mistress, "this girl is not so stupid as her deportment: in reading of faces, and frying of omelets, there we are great. 'Twould be hard if we failed at these arts, since they are about all we do know."
"You do not quite take me, dame," said Gerard. "That honesty in a face should shine forth to your experienced eye, that seems reasonable: but how by looking on Denys here could you learn his one little foible, his insanity, his miserable mulierosity?" Poor Gerard got angrier the more he thought of it.
"His mule—his what?" (crossing herself with superstitious awe at the polysyllable).
"Nay, 'tis but the word I was fain to invent for him."
"Invent? What can a child like you make other words than grow in Burgundy by nature? Take heed what ye do! why we are overrun with them already, especially bad ones. Lord, these be times. I look to hear of a new thistle invented next."
"But, dame, I found language too poor to paint him. I was fain to invent. You know Necessity is the mother of—"