"Good heavens!" said the duchess, "you won't tell us?"
"I won't."
"You'll let us find out! Shall I know nothing of the marriage of my brother's child till I read it in the Times? It shall not be! Augustin, does she mean it?"
Augustin lighted a cigarette and walked to the window, which looked down on the traffic of Piccadilly.
"I give it up," said Augustin. "When could I answer riddles? Do you mean it, Pen?"
And Penelope, rising up, stood on the hearthrug and, looking like the descendant of a viking and some fair Venetian, declared that she did mean it. And she further went on to say, in great haste and with a most remarkable flow of words, that it shouldn't be in the Times or any other paper. And she said that if Titania, Duchess of Goring, was her aunt, it couldn't be helped, and that her principles were more to her than any one's approval. Though she loved her aunt and her dear sweet guardian, these same principles were even dearer than they were. And she said that they had no principles ("not even Guardy dear"), and that they only thought of a demon thing called Society, which was at once a fetich and a phantom. And she became so excited that she talked like a real woman orator upon a platform, and expressed her intention of using her influence to bring about reform, especially in such matters and with regard to young men who did nothing, and seemed to think they had been created for that very purpose. And, as she talked, there wasn't a man in the world who would not have yearned to take his coat off and ask for a pick and shovel at the least, for she was as beautiful as any young goddess fresh from Grecian foam or from high Olympus. Even Bradstock sighed to think that he had never done anything for the human race, which required so much help, but sit in the Upper House, a speechless phantom. And Ethel Mytton cried with an imparted enthusiasm, while the duchess wept with horror.
"And more than that," said Penelope, who broke down in her eloquence and resorted to the tone of conversation, "more than that, I'll never, never let you know whom I marry! I mean it! That—that's flat!"
And after this damp but awful peroration, she sat down with heaving bosom, and poor, bewildered Titania shook her head till it looked as if it would come off. She found no flow of words to oppose Penelope with. The biggest river is nothing when it flows into the sea, and, if Titania was the Amazon, Pen was the South Atlantic.
"Not who he is?" said the duchess, as feebly as if she were no more than a brook in a meadow.
"I will not," said Penelope, like a sea in a cyclone.