understand that an Algerian corsair would sharpen his scimitar at the
very sight of them.

Don't think either that they are all dying to get married; because
they are not. I don't say they wouldn't take an errant knight, or a
buccaneer or a Hungarian refugee, but for the ordinary marriages of
ordinary people they feel nothing but a pitying disdain. So it is
that each one of them in due time marries an enchanted prince and
goes to live in one of the little enchanted houses in the lower part
of the town.

I don't know whether you know it, but you can rent an enchanted house
in Mariposa for eight dollars a month, and some of the most
completely enchanted are the cheapest. As for the enchanted princes,
they find them in the strangest places, where you never expected to
see them, working--under a spell, you understand,--in drug-stores and
printing offices, and even selling things in shops. But to be able to
find them you have first to read ever so many novels about Sir
Galahad and the Errant Quest and that sort of thing.


Naturally then Zena Pepperleigh, as she sat on the piazza, dreamed of
bandits and of wounded officers and of Lord Ronalds riding on
foam-flecked chargers. But that she ever dreamed of a junior bank
teller in a daffodil blazer riding past on a bicycle, is pretty hard
to imagine. So, when Mr. Pupkin came tearing past up the slope of
Oneida Street at a speed that proved that he wasn't riding there
merely to pass the house, I don't suppose that Zena Pepperleigh was
aware of his existence.