"
"Unmannerly jester and scoffer that you are! is nothing sacred to you?"
broke in Leander, with some show of heat.
"You push my modesty too far. I endeavoured delicately to put off upon
a dead beauty what I should have ascribed to a living one. Ignorant and
unsophisticated though you claim to be, have you never heard of kisses
so ardent that such traces of them are left?--where pearly teeth have
closed upon the soft flesh, and made their mark on the white skin?"
"Memorem dente notam," interrupted the pedant, charmed to have a chance
to quote Horace.
"This explanation appears to me very judicious," Scapin said; then,
with a low bow to the pedant, "and is sustained by unquestionable if
incomprehensible authority; but the mark is so long that this nocturnal
beauty of yours, dead or alive, must have had in her lovely mouth that
famous tooth which the three Gorgon sisters owned among them, and passed
about from one to the other."
This sally was followed by a roar of laughter, and Leander, beside
himself with rage, half rose, to throw himself upon Scopin, and chastise
him then and there for his insufferable impertinence; but he was so
stiff and sore from his own beating, and the pain in his back, which was
striped like a zebra's, was so excruciating, that he sank back into his
place with a suppressed groan, and concluded to postpone his revenge to
some more convenient season.
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