It booms--a curfew bell--for every poor little light that we would read by.' Seeing their beacon-nosed postillion preparing too mount and failing in his jump, Redworth was apprehensive, and questioned the fellow concerning potation.
'Lord, sir, they call me half a horse, but I can't 'bids water,' was the reply, with the assurance that he had not 'taken a pailful.' Habit enabled him to gain his seat.
'It seems to us unnecessary to heap on coal when the chimney is afire; but he may know the proper course,' Diana said, convulsing Danvers; and there was discernibly to Redworth, under the influence of her phrases, a likeness of the flaming 'half-horse,' with the animals all smoking in the frost, to a railway engine.

'Your wrinkled centaur,' she named the man.

Of course he had to play second to her, and not unwillingly; but he reflected passingly on the instinctive push of her rich and sparkling voluble fancy to the initiative, which women do not like in a woman, and men prefer to distantly admire.

English women and men feel toward the quick-witted of their species as to aliens, having the demerits of aliens-wordiness, vanity, obscurity, shallowness, an empty glitter, the sin of posturing.

A quick-witted woman exerting her wit is both a foreigner and potentially a criminal.