"If she were," observed the goddess, with the air of one who mentioned an ordinary fact, "I should crush her!"
"Lord bless me!" cried Leander, in his horror. "What for?"
"Would not she be in my path? and shall any mortal maid stand between me and my desire?"
This was a discovery. She was a jealous and vengeful goddess; she would require to be sedulously humoured, or harm would come.
"Well, well," he said soothingly, "there's nothing of that sort about her, I do assure you."
"Then I spare her," said the goddess. "But how, then, if this be truly so, do you still shrink from the honour before you?"
Leander felt a natural unwillingness to explain that it was because he was engaged to a young lady who kept the accounts at a florist's.
"Well, the fact is," he said awkwardly, "there's difficulties in the way."
"Difficulties? I can remove them all!" she said.
"Not these you can't, mum. It's like this: You and me, we don't start, so to speak, from the same basin. I don't mean it as any reproach to you, but you can't deny you're an Eathen, and, worse than that, an Eathen goddess. Now all my family have been brought up as chapel folk, Primitive Methodists, and I've been trained to have a horror of superstition and idolatries, and see the folly of it. So you can see for yourself that we shouldn't be likely to get on together!"