Frank Harris - My life and loves Vol. 3

To atone, I told him another story which pleased him a little more. A married woman took her young sister of twelve for the first time to the theatre. The child sat entranced, though the play was a poor melodrama to the third act, when the hero asks the heroine to marry him: she will not; again he asks her and she refuses. "If you refuse again," he cried, "I'll make you my paramour!"

At once the little cockney girl exclaimed, "'Ark at the swine!"

Then I told him another story which pleased him better. "At the end of one of my lectures in New York," I began, "a man in the audience rose and evidently as a joke said:

"'The lecturer spoke of "virgin" once or twice; would he be kind enough to tell us just what he means by "virgin"?' "'Certainly,' I replied, 'the meaning is plain; "vir," as everyone knows, is Latin for a man, while "gin" is good old English for a trap; virgin is therefore a mantrap.' "Everyone laughed and a lady in the hall rose and kept up the game.

"'I believed,' she said, 'that all traps were usually open and afterwards closed, while the reverse seems to be the case with the mantrap.' "The laughter grew and finally a man got up: 'I have another objection,' he said. 'Traps are always easy to enter and hard to get out of, whereas this trap is hard to enter and easy to get out of.' "

The Prince, laughing, said, "You made those two answers up, Harris, I'm sure."

"I give you my word," I replied, "that the definition was all I invented."