“Scarab, tarantula, neurop—”
“‘Doodle-bug,’” she prompted severely.
“—doodle-bug, flea,”—
he concluded obediently.
“Scarab, tarantula, doodle-bug, flea. Scarab, tarantula, doodle—”
“Oof! I—I—didn’t think you’d be here so soon!”
He scrambled to his feet, hardly less palpitating than on the occasion
of their first encounter.
“Hopeless!” she mourned. “Incurable! Wanted: a miracle of St. Vitus. Do
stop nibbling your hat, and sit down.”
“I don’t think it’s as bad as it was,” he murmured, obeying. “One gets
accustomed to you.”
“One gets accustomed to anything in time, even the eccentricities of
one’s friends.”
“Do you think I’m eccentric?”
“Do I think—Have you ever known any one who didn’t think you
eccentric?”
Upon this he pondered solemnly.
“It’s so long since I’ve stopped to consider what people think of me.
One hasn’t time, you know.”
“Then one is unhuman. _I_ have time.”
“Of course. But you haven’t anything else to do.”
As this was quite true, she naturally felt annoyed.
“Knowing as you do all the secrets of my inner life,” she observed
sarcastically, “of course you are in a position to judge.”
Her own words recalled Carroll’s charge, and though, with the subject
of them before her, it seemed ridiculously impossible, yet the spirit
of mischief, ever hovering about her like an attendant sprite,
descended and took possession of her speech. She assumed a severely
judicial expression.
“Mr. Beetle Man, will you lay your hand upon your microscope, or
whatever else scientists make oath upon, and answer fully and truly the
question about to be put to you?”
“As I hope for a blessed release from this abode of lunacy, I will.”
“Mr. Beetle Man, have you got an awful secret in your life?”
So sharply did he start that the heavy goggles slipped a fraction of an
inch along his nose, the first time she had ever seen them in any
degree misplaced. She was herself sensibly discountenanced by his
perturbation.
“Why do you ask that?” he demanded.
“Natural interest in a friend,” she answered lightly, but with growing
wonder. “I think you’d be altogether irresistible if you were a pirate
or a smuggler or a revolutionary. The romantic spirit could lurk so
securely behind those gloomy soul-screens that you wear. What do you
keep back of them, O dark and shrouded beetle man?”
“My eyes,” he grunted.
“Basilisk eyes, I’m sure. And what behind the eyes?”
“My thoughts.”
“You certainly keep them securely. No intruders allowed. But you
haven’t answered my question. Have you ever murdered any one in cold
blood? Or are you a married man trifling with the affections of poor
little me?”
“You shall know all,” he began, in the leisurely tone of one who
commences a long narrative. “My parents were honest, but poor. At the
age of three years and four months, a maternal uncle, who, having been
a proofreader of Abyssinian dialect stories for a ladies’ magazine, was
considered a literary prophet, foretold that I—”
“Help! Wait! Stop!—
“‘Oh, skip your dear uncle!’ the bellman exclaimed,
And impatiently tinkled his bell.”