Once for France.
Once for womanhood.
And once because she liked it.
The whip whistled.
It was said that he had been seen to strike at her—but she parried the blow with her left, and countered between his eyes with the butt-end of the whip—which was loaded.
He fell.
It was homeric.
It was at this stage, so the scandal went, that he scrambled under a table; but she lugged at his collar to get him out; and as he clung to the leg of the table she gripped him by the moustache so that she pulled off one side of it.
But she herself owned this to be as inartistic as it was unintentional, stamping her foot with annoyance at the mischance. Indeed, she apologized most handsomely; for, said she, pathetically, when she had got it she did not know what to do with it.
It was an anticlimax.