"Well, why don't you laugh at the rattle of the dry bones?" asked Basil, as I read on, more and more puzzled.
"I haven't come to many funny things yet," said I, "except about Job. That was rather good, though I don't see how you weave such things into your books."
"Job--Job?" he repeated vaguely. Then a rush of blood went over his whole face, up to his forehead. His dreamy dark eyes looked suddenly anything but dreamy. "Good Heavens!" he gasped. "What have you got there?" and began to ransack all the pockets of his waistcoat and coat until he found the twin of the book he'd given me. "This is what I meant you to see," he said in a queer, ashamed voice.
I handed the first book back to him. He seized it and glanced from page to page, looking almost ill. By and by he came to something which seemed to scare him. As far as I could tell, it was farther toward the end than I had read.
"Would you mind showing me where you left off," he asked.
"It was where you were wondering whether your new heroine had swallowed radium or something," said I.
"Oh!" He looked relieved. "Well--I wouldn't have had you see that idiotic stuff for a good deal. But I told you, didn't I, that if the book went on I'd have to put you into it? There's a lot of silly rot there. Poetical license!"
"The thing that made the most impression on me was the part about the red hair," I said. "The description sounded so nice. Who was Circe, please? Was she Scottish? It's a name a Pictish princess might have had."
"The first Circe lived even before the Pictish princesses," Basil answered, quieting down, though he was still very flushed. "But she's had a good many descendants--one or two at least in each generation of women born in every country. Not that you--I mean the new heroine--will be one of them really."
"Do? She was an exceptionally attractive woman. She had a special kind of magnetism that nobody could resist. She amused herself by turning all the men she knew--there were quite a lot of them--into animals of different sorts."
"I think it would have been cleverer and more attractive of her if she had turned animals into men," said I.
"That's what _my_ heroine can do," Basil explained. "She's a kind of miniature baby Circe, for her red hair and general get up, and her curious power of upsetting people and their plans from the first minute they see her. But--my heroine wouldn't and couldn't turn her victims into beasts. She makes them want to transform themselves into something very extra special in the way of manliness."