"PSEUDONYMIA!" said PERUGINO, blushing easily to his finger-tips.
"PERUGINO!" said PSEUDONYMIA, blushing to hers. It was early, of course, for Christian names, but then the Terewth had made them Free-and-Easy.
"PERUGINO!" said PSEUDONYMIA, bringing her eyes back from the infinite to rest without affectation on her simple Greek chiton, "I have often wanted to meet a real man who had written a book with a key to it on the back of the cover. Now tell me frankly some more beautiful things about our present loathsome system of chartered monogamy, so degrading to my sex. Talk straight on, please, pages at a time. Never mind about Probability. Terewth is stranger than Probability; and the Terewth, you know, shall make you Free!"
PERUGINO sank back into the spongy turf, leaning his cheek against an upright spike of summer furze of the genus _Ulex Europæus_. "Some men," he began, "ignoble souls, 'look about' them before they marry. Such are calculating egoists. Pure souls, of finer paste, are, so to speak, _born married_. Others hesitate and delay. The difficulties of teething, a paltry desire to be weaned before the wedding, reluctance to being married in long clothes, the terrors of croup during the honeymoon--these and other excuses, thinly veiling hidden depths of depravity, are employed to defer the divine moment. I have known men to reach the preposterously ripe age of one-and-twenty unwedded, protesting that they dare not risk their prospects at the Bar. These men can never mate like the birds, never be guide-posts to point humanity along the path of Terewth."
"But," interrupted PSEUDONYMIA, rose-red to her quivering finger-tips with shame at the bare mention of marriage; "but I thought you disapproved of the debasing principle of wedlock."
"Do not interrupt," said PERUGINO, kindly; "I will come to that two or three pages later on. To be prudent, I was going to say, is to be vicious and cruel. Of course it is not given to all to be _born_ married. But this natal defect one can easily remedy. I knew a young fellow who did. The indispensable complement crossed his path before it was too late. He was still at his preparatory school; _he married the matron_. True, there was disparity of age, but it was a step in the right direction; though the head-master, a man of common conventional ideas, gave the boy a severe rebuke.
