“You shan’t go,” he said in a low hoarse tone, clutching at her arm. “By God, you shan’t!”
But he succeeded only in grasping her dangling horn, and, in her dart forward, it was left in his hand. “I didn’t ask you to ‘take’ that!” she laughed back as she crossed the threshold. “I meant, what’s your drink?”
“Jinny!” he breathed, his voice frozen.
“Mine’s ink!” she called out gaily, and the males, now aware of her presence, vied with one another to pass the bottle and pen on the counter to her, together with the little bowl of sand, all of which she bore to the quiet side of the room, where a protracted desk supplied facilities for notes and accounts. Reassured, but still resentful, Will stood at the door, awkwardly holding her horn with its bit of broken girdle, and watching her protectively as she scribbled on a piece of paper, and blotted it with the sand. Then coming back to him, she took away her horn—not without a reproachful glance at the snapped cord—and putting her folded paper into his hand instead, glided past him and was lost in the hurly-burly.
Disconsolate, yet excited, he opened the note, and read this wholly unexpected quatrain:
Swearing
Of all the nauseous complicated crimes
That both infect and stigmatize the Times;
There’s none that can with impious Oaths compare,
Where Vice and Folly have an equal Share.