“Most things are gray.”
“Oh no, they’re not! Some things are. Old men’s beards and dirty linen and Tschaikowsky’s music and oysters and Wesleyans.”
“There you go,” he jeered.
“Where do I go?”
“Right off the point,” said Arthur, triumphantly. “No woman can argue.”
“Oh, but I’m not a woman,” Sylvia contradicted. “I’m a mythical female monster, don’t you know—one of those queer beasts with claws like hay-rakes and breasts like peg-tops and a tail like a fish.”
“Do you mean a Sphinx?” Arthur asked, in his literal way. He was always rather hostile toward her extravagant fancies, because he thought it dangerous to encourage a woman in much the same way as he would have objected to encouraging a beggar.
“No, I really meant a grinx, which is rather like a Sphinx, but the father was a griffin—the mother in both cases was a minx, of course.”
“What was the father of the Sphinx?” he asked, rather ungraciously.
Sylvia clapped her hands.