No, the boaster and the braggart, the Don Juan in the stall who feels it imperative to proclaim his cocksmith’s roisterings under the sheets and out of them to those who would gape and goggle and pry and intrude are, to my fancy, the basest of villains, and if one were to examine at the source their prattlings of tireless bouts of amatory conquest, one would probably find they had more pence in their pockets than honest prick. For the man who has the demon within him to urge him on to blabber all his nocturnal squirmings in the stews is deeply at heart a sadly inferior wretch who must compensate himself for his own actual lack of priapic stamina by substituting tales that would surpass tellings of a veritable Sinbad.
So there, I have said my piece, and done the only moralizing for this volume, for which I crave your honest indulgence. But now let me take up once again the thread of my own delicious affairs at the point which followed the departure of the charming Marion and her exquisitely saucy maidservant Kay.
I had made the resolve to ask Alice for her hand in marriage. Now I will confess that at the outset of my adventures with her I had really no such intention. When one has been a bird on the wing for so long as I, it is difficult at first blush to reconcile oneself to the gilded cage and to the regimen of daily monotony which invariably, alas, seems to follow the most riotously hymenean pursuits. On the day which followed the sweet reconciliation of Marion with her maid, I seriously asked myself if I was not, in making so heroic a sacrifice of my freedom, terminating at one fell swoop all those future bequests which Venus might perhaps have in store for me in my later years.