The fairy drew herself up, and her graceful garland of simple equations trembled as Edwin breathed heavily.
“A Pirate,” said she, “a nice sort of pirate who can’t calculate his men’s share of the plunder to three-seventeenths of a gold link of the dead captain’s chain! A fine bushranger who can’t arrange the forty-two bullets from the revolvers of his seven dauntless followers so that each of the fifteen enemies gets his fair share! Go along with you!” said the Arithmetic Fairy.
But Edwin’s eyes were, as I said, wide open, goggling.
“I say,” he suddenly remarked, “how jolly pretty you are.”
The Arithmetic Fairy has but one weakness—a feminine weakness. She loves a pretty speech. If blunt, so much the worse; yet even bluntness....
She looked down and played shyly with the bunch of miscellaneous examples in vulgar fractions which adorned her waistband.
“I suppose you can’t be expected to understand, yet,” she said, and she said it very gently.
Edwin took courage.
“When I do things I want something to happen at once. ‘I want a white rabbit and I want it now.’”
She did not recognise the quotation.