However, it doesn't matter--I know.

It's tremendously neat--a real reproach; quite remarkably thick and without, as yet, a single strand of white.

There!" He blushed for her realism, but gaped at her truth.

"You're the very deuce." "What else SHOULD I be?
It was as the very deuce I pounced on you.

But don't let it trouble you, for everything but the very deuce--at our age--is a bore and a delusion, and even he himself, after all, but half a joy." With which, on a single sweep of her wing, she resumed.