“Precisely. A lovely woman with her arms around a jackass. Does that never happen in Kings Port?”
He began smiling to himself. “I’m afraid Puck isn’t all dead yet.”
I was now in a position to begin dropping my bitters. “Shakespeare was probably too gallant to put it the other way, and make Oberon fall in love with a female jackass. But what an allegory!”
“Yes,” he muttered. “Yes.”
I followed with another drop. “Titania got out of it. It is not always solved so easily.”
“No,” he muttered. “No.” It was quite evident that the flavor of my bitters reached him.
He was walking slowly, with his head down, and frowning hard. We had now come to the steps of my boarding-house, and I dropped my last drop. “But a disenchanted woman has the best of it—before marriage, at least.”
He looked up quickly. “How?”
I evinced surprise. “Why, she can always break off honorably, and we never can, I suppose.”
For the third time this day he made me an astonishing rejoinder: “Would you like to take orders from a negro?”