Miss Jane said, 'Well it _is_ very difficult to know what to do in making an offer of marriage. I have had six proposals--that is, formal proposals--all of which I refused peremptorily, as I think that I was made for a higher end than to be the wife of any man--and they were all done differently; but, on the whole, I prefer the colonel's method; and I think in proposing to Muriel you had better follow it.' 'Oh, thank you! Tell me exactly what he did, and I'll practise it just now.' In his excitement Dempster's body, lithe and lissom as that of the most poetical maiden, partook in the motion of his head. Miss Jane, who had often been on the point of speaking to him about this absurd habit, burst out, 'Don't wriggle that way, as if you were impaled!' Dempster shrivelled up, and hung flaccid on his spinal column, like a hooked worm that has been long in the water. 'I assure you,' continued Miss Jane, less harshly, 'if you are ever to take a place in the world you must overcome that.' 'Must I! I'm very glad you've told me. It's my natural form.' 'Conquer it, conquer it. Remember Demosthenes, Mr. Dempster.' 'I will, I will,' he cried, almost breaking his back, and causing a hot shooting pain in his head, as he nipped a sprouting corkscrew in the bud--a metaphor worthy of himself. Then he made a sudden plunge into a sea of words, where he had to keep perpetually rapping on the head an electric eel that tried with unremitting fervour to run, or rather wriggle, the gauntlet of his body and escape by his skull through the suture. 'Miss Chartres,' he said, 'I wish you would help me. I have been wanting to get married for six years now, and I can't. I won't be caught. They try it, the mothers. They dangle their daughters before me like--like Mayflies. But I won't bite. I'd sooner starve, Miss Chartres, starve. Die in a ditch--celibacy, you know. I'll never marry one of these artificial flies. They may be good enough; but it's their mothers--O, their mothers! Why, I've read about them in novels. And then, when I do fall in love with a nice--with a sweet--a natural--eh--ah--a natural fly--you understand--I--I can't bite--haven't the courage--don't know how. I've been in love before several times--though I never loved anybody before like Muriel--and I couldn't possibly manage to--to bite. But you'll teach me now, my dear Miss Chartres.' He emerged, dripping, and the long-repressed eel shot out at the crown of his head in a rapid spasm, leaving him a mere husk propped against the elm. Miss Jane, who had made up her mind that he should marry Muriel, put his sincerity against his _gaucherie_, and determined to drill him into some better form; for she judged that if the excitement of talking about a proposal produced effects of the kind she had witnessed, that of making one would simply stultify its object. 'I'll help you,' she said. 'Stand there.'