"Well," Miss Dassonville was not disposed to take it lightly, "if a
woman has a right to a fineness that's bought at another's expense. They
can't all run away, you know, and I can't think it right for a woman to
evade the disagreeable things just because some man makes it possible."

"I believe," laughed Peter, "if you had been the Princess you would have
killed the dragon yourself. You'd have taken a little bomb up your
sleeve and thrown it at him." He had to take that note to cover a
confused sense he had of the conversation being more pertinent than he
could at that moment remember a reason for its being.

"Oh, I've been delivered to the dragons before now," she said. "It's
going on all the time." She moved a little away from the picture as if
to avoid the personal issue.

"What beats me," commented Mrs. Merrithew, "is that there has to be a
young lady. You'd think a likely young man, if he met one of them
things, would just kill it on general principles, the same as a snake or
a spider."

"Oh," said Peter, "it's chiefly because they are terrifying to young
ladies that we kill them at all. Yes, there has to be a young lady." He
was aware of an accession of dreariness in the certainty that in his
case there never could be a young lady. But Miss Dassonville as she
began to walk toward the entrance gave it another turn.

"There _is_ always a young lady. The difficulty is that it must be a
particular one. No one takes any account of those who were eaten up
before the Princess appeared."

"But you must grant," said Peter, with an odd sense of defending his own
position, "that when one got done with a fight like that, one would be
entitled to something particular."

"Oh, if it came as a reward," she laughed. "But nowadays we've reversed
the process. One makes sure of the Princess first, lest when the dragon
is killed she should prove to have gone away with one of the
bystanders."

Something that clicked in Peter's mind led him to look sharply from one
to the other of the two women. In Bloombury they had a way, he knew, of
not missing any point of their neighbours' affairs, but their faces
expressed no trace of an appreciation of anything in the subject being
applicable to his. The flick of memory passed and left him wondering why
it should be.

He caught himself looking covertly at the girl as the gondola swung into
open water, to discover in her the springs of an experience such as lay
at the source of his