“Yes, why not?” asked Fortinbras, seeing Martin hesitate, and his smile was archiepiscopal indulgence. “Why but one taste of ambrosial lips?”
Martin reddened beneath his olive skin. “I hardly like to say—it seems so indelicate——”
“Allons donc” cried Corinna. “We’re in Paris, not Wendlebury.”
“We must get to the bottom of this, my dear Martin—it’s a privilege I demand from my clients to address them by their Christian names—otherwise how can I establish the necessary intimate rapport between them and myself? So I repeat, my dear Martin, we must have the reason for the rupture or the dissolution or the termination of what seems to be the only romantic episode in your career. I’m not joking,” Fortinbras added gravely, after a pause. “From the psychological point of view, it is important that I should know.”
Martin looked appealingly from one to the other—from Fortinbras massively serious to Corinna serenely mocking.
“A weeny unencouraged plumber?” she suggested.
He sat bolt upright and gasped. “Good God, no!” He flushed indignant. “She was a most highly respectable girl. Nothing of that sort. I wish I hadn’t mentioned the matter. It’s entirely unimportant.”
“If that is so,” said Corinna, “why didn’t you kiss the girl again?”
“Well, if you want to know,” replied Martin desperately, “I have a constitutional horror of the smell of onions,” and mechanically he sucked through his straw the tepid residue of melted ice in his glass.
Corinna threw herself back in her chair and laughed uncontrollably. It was just the lunatic sort of thing that would happen to poor old Martin. She knew her sex. Instantaneously she pictured in her mind the fluffy, lower middle-class young person who set her cap at the gentleman with the long Grecian nose, and she entered into her devastated frame of mind when he wriggled awkwardly out of further osculatory invitations. And the good, solid plumber, onion-loving soul, had carried her off, not figuratively but literally under the nose of Martin.