"Oh, wouldn't you?" returned Ethel with somewhat over-emphasized incredulity. "Anyhow, I am not going to let John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook slip through my fingers."
"Trust you," Dagmar laughed scornfully. "You'll hold him as tight as he was when he proposed to you."
"As he says he was," Ethel corrected.
"As he must have been," Dagmar maintained unfeelingly. "After all," the amiable young lady continued, with a yawn, "who is John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook that he should be exempt from matrimony? Better men than he have submitted to it. Julius Caesar was married—and——"
"And Alexander the Great," Ethel supplied as her sister paused for another notable victim of the marriage tie.
"Yes, I think he was," pursued Dagmar indifferently.
"If he wasn't, he——" she yawned again. "And Maryborough, and Edward the Black Prince were married men."
"So was Henry the Eighth," observed Ethel sententiously.
"Certainly. And Napoleon, and pretty well everybody worth mentioning, and heaps not worth it. And who, pray, is John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook that he should cry off and plead Mumm? Nobody!"
"He has four thousand a year," Ethel remarked in mitigation of her recalcitrant suitor's total extinction.