She eyed him calmly. "Not such a good one as the lad's: nor ever will be. But it is the face of a true man. For all that," added she drily, "an I were ten years younger, I'd as lieve not meet that face on a dark night too far from home." Gerard stared. Denys laughed. "Why, dame, I would but sip the night dew off the flower; and you needn't take ten years off, nor ten days, to be worth risking a scratched face for." "There, our mistress," said Marion, who had just come in, "said I not t'other day, you could make a fool of them still, an if you were properly minded?" "I dare say ye did: it sounds like some daft wench's speech." "Dame," said Gerard, "this is wonderful." "What? Oh: no, no, that is no wonder at all. Why, I have been here all my life: and reading faces is the first thing a girl picks up in an inn." _Marion._] "And frying eggs the second; no, telling lies; frying eggs is the third, though." _The Mistress._] "And holding her tongue the last, and modesty the day after never at all." _Marion._] "Alack! Talk of _my_ tongue. But I say no more. She, under whose wing I live, now deals the blow. I'm sped--'tis but a chambermaid gone. Catch what's left on't," and she staggered and sank backwards on to the handsomest fellow in the room, which happened to be Gerard. "Tic! tic!" cried he, peevishly, "there, don't be stupid! that is too heavy a jest for me. See you not I am talking to the mistress?" Marion resumed her elasticity with a grimace; made two little bounds into the middle of the floor and there turned a pirouette. "There, mistress," said she, "I give in, 'tis you that reigns supreme with the men; leastways with male children." "Young man," said the mistress, "this girl is not so stupid as her deportment: in reading of faces, and frying of omelets, there we are great. 'Twould be hard if we failed at these arts, since they are about all we do know." "You do not quite take me, dame," said Gerard. "That honesty in a face should shine forth to your experienced eye, that seems reasonable: but how by looking on Denys here could you learn his one little foible, his insanity, his miserable mulierosity?" Poor Gerard got angrier the more he thought of it. "His mule--his what?" (crossing herself with superstitious awe at the polysyllable). "Nay, 'tis but the word I was fain to invent for him." "Invent? What can a child like you make other words than grow in Burgundy by nature? Take heed what ye do! why we are overrun with them already, especially bad ones. Lord, these be times. I look to hear of a new thistle invented next." "But, dame, I found language too poor to paint him. I was fain to invent. You know Necessity is the mother of--" "Ay! ay, that is old enough, o' conscience." "Well then, dame, mulierose--that means wrapped up, body and soul, in women. So prithee tell me; how did you ever detect the noodle's mulierosity?"