She had challenged him, and he knew it.

"Nothing what-ever," she answered, with an urbanity that defied the suggestion of malice.

Yet, now that she remembered, she had sweetly challenged one of a royal house for the like lapse into the vulgar tongue.

A man should not be beheaded because of a what.

So she continued more seriously: "The idea must be himself, all of him, born with him, the rightful output of his own nature, the thing he must inevitably do, or waste his life." She looked him honestly in the eyes.