“Haven't I, so far, invented things, made life amusing, Cheetah? Can't you trust the leopard's wisdom?”
He stared at the coast inexorably.
“I wonder,” she whispered.
“What?”
“You ARE that, Cheetah, that lank, long, EAGER beast—.”
Suddenly with a nimble hand she had unbuttoned and rolled up the sleeve of her blouse. She stuck her pretty blue-veined arm before his eyes. “Look here, sir, it was you, wasn't it? It was your powerful jaw inflicted this bite upon the arm of a defenceless young leopardess—”
“Amanda!”
“Well.” She wrinkled her brows.
He turned about and stood over her, he shook a finger in her face and there was a restrained intensity in his voice as he spoke.
“Look here, Amanda!” he said, “if you think that you are going to make me agree to any sort of project about London, to any sort of complication of our lives with houses in smart streets and a campaign of social assertion—by THAT, then may I be damned for an uxorious fool!”