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Pasquale, being in the sixth form at the time I joined, was
exempt from corporal punishmentwhen they both rose flushed from
their grovelling beneath the table, and some merry remark from
Pasquale put the question out of my head.
All this is unimportant. The main result of Pasquale's visit
this evening is a discovery.
Now, is it, after all, a discovery, or only the nonmoral
intellect's sinister attribution of motives?
A baby in long clothes would have seen through it, said
Pasquale. Lord bless you, if I were in your position I would go
on board that yacht, I'd make violent love to every female there,
like the gentleman in Mr. Wycherley's comedy, I'd fill a salmon
flybook with samples of their hair, I'd make them hate one
another like poison, and at the end of the voyage I'd announce my
engagement to Carlotta, and when they all came to the wedding I'd
make the flybook the most conspicuous of wedding presents on the
table, from the bridegroom to the bride. By George! I'd cure
them of the taste for manhunting!
I wonder what impelled me to tell Pasquale of the proposed
yachting cruise? We sat smoking by the open window, long after
Carlotta had been sent to bed, and looking at a full moon sailing
over the tops of the trees in the park; enveloped in that
sensuous atmosphere of a warm summer night which induces a
languor in the body and in the will. On such a night as this
young Lorenzo, if he happens to have Jessica by his side, makes a
confounded idiot of himself, to his life's undoing; and on such a
night as this a reserved philosopher commits the folly of
discussing his private affairs with a Sebastian Pasquale.
But if he is correct in his surmise, I am much beholden to the
relaxing influences of the night. I have been warned of perils
that encompass me: perils that would infest the base and
insidiously scale the sides of the most inaccessible tower that
man could build on the edge of the Regent's Park. A woman with a
Matrimonial Purpose would be quite capable of gaining access by
balloon to my turret window. Is it not my Aunt Jessica's design
melodramatically to abduct me in a yacht?
Once aboard the pirate lugger, and the man is ours! she cries.
But the man is not coming aboard the pirate lugger. He is going
to keep as far as he possibly can from the shore. Neither is he
to be lured into bringing his lovely Mohammedan ward with him, as
an evidence of good faith and unimpeachable morals. They can

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