“Oh, Martin, you’re too funny for words!” she cried.
Fortinbras smiled always benevolently. “If Cleopatra’s nose had been a centimetre longer—I forget the exact classical epigram—the history of the world would have been changed. In a minor degree—for the destiny of an individual must, of course, be of less importance than the destiny of mankind—had it not been for one spring onion, unconsidered fellow of the robin and the burnished dove and the wanton lapwing, this young man’s fancy would have been fettered in the thoughts of love. One spring onion—and human destinies are juggled. Martin is still a soul-starved bachelor, and—and—her name?”
“Gwendoline?”
“And Gwendoline is the buxom mother of five.”
“Six,” said Martin. “I can’t help knowing,” he explained, “since I still lodge with her mother.”
Corinna turned her head sideways to scrutinise the drawing on the tablecloth, and still scrutinising it, asked:
“And that is your one and only affaire du cœur?”
“I’m afraid the only one,” replied Martin shamefacedly. Even so mild a man as he felt the disadvantage of not being able to hint to a woman that he could talk, and he would, of chimes heard at midnight and of broken hearts and other circumstances hedging round a devil of a fellow. His one kiss seemed a very bread-and-buttery affair—to say nothing of the mirth-provoking onion. And the emotion attending the approach to it had been of a nature so tepid that disillusion caused scarcely a pang. It had been better to pose as an out-and-out Sir Galahad, a type comprehensible to women. As the hero of one invertebrate embrace he cut a sorry figure.
“You are still young. The years and the women’s lips before you are many,” said Fortinbras, laying a comforting touch on Martin’s shoulder. “Opportunity makes the lover as it does the thief. And in the bed-sitting-room in Hickney Heath where you have spent your young life where has been the opportunity? It pleases our Paris-hardened young friend to mock; but I see in you the making of a great lover, a Bertrand d’Allamanon, a Chastelard, one who will count the world well lost for a princess’s smile——”
Corinna interrupted. “What pernicious nonsense are you talking, Fortinbras? You’ve got love on the brain to-night. Neither Martin nor I are worrying our heads about it. Love be hanged! We’re each of us worried to death over the problem of how to keep body and soul together without going back to prison and you talk all this drivel about love—at least not to me, but to Martin.”