. . . . . .
What Biel wants to know is:--"Why didn't I press home the charge against the
Bronckhorst-brute, and have him run in?"
What Mrs. Strickland wants to know is:--"How DID my husband bring such a
lovely, lovely Waler from your Station? I know ALL his money-affairs; and I'm
CERTAIN he didn't BUY it."
What I want to know is:--How do women like Mrs. Bronckhorst come to marry men
like Bronckhorst?"
And my conundrum is the most unanswerable of the three.
VENUS ANNODOMINI.
And the years went on as the years must do;
But our great Diana was always new--
Fresh, and blooming, and blonde, and fair,
With azure eyes and with aureate hair;
And all the folk, as they came or went,
Offered her praise to her heart's content.
--Diana of Ephesus.
She had nothing to do with Number Eighteen in the Braccio Nuovo of the Vatican,
between Visconti's Ceres and the God of the Nile. She was purely an Indian
deity--an Anglo-Indian deity, that is to say--and we called her THE Venus
Annodomini, to distinguish her from other Annodominis of the same everlasting
order. There was a legend among the Hills that she had once been young; but no
living man was prepared to come forward and say boldly that the legend was
true.
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