penny gaff; out of tavern and street, and court and doss-house, he
had gathered together slang words and terms and phrases, and they
came back to him now, and he stood up against her manfully.

But as well might the lamb stand up against the eagle, when the
shadow of its wings falls across the green pastures, and the wind
flies before its dark oncoming. At the end of two minutes he lay
gasping, dazed, and speechless.

Then she began.

She announced her intention of "wiping down the bloomin' 'all" with
him, and making it respectable; and, metaphorically speaking, that is
what she did. Her tongue hit him between the eyes, and knocked him
down and trampled on him. It curled round and round him like a whip,
and then it uncurled and wound the other way. It seized him by the
scruff of his neck, and tossed him up into the air, and caught him as
he descended, and flung him to the ground, and rolled him on it. It
played around him like forked lightning, and blinded him. It danced
and shrieked about him like a host of whirling fiends, and he tried
to remember a prayer, and could not. It touched him lightly on the
sole of his foot and the crown of his head, and his hair stood up
straight, and his limbs grew stiff. The people sitting near him drew
away, not feeling it safe to be near, and left him alone, surrounded
by space, and language.

It was the most artistic piece of work of its kind that I have ever
heard. Every phrase she flung at him seemed to have been woven on
purpose to entangle him and to embrace in its choking folds his
people and his gods, to strangle with its threads his every hope,