Chapter II.
When Margerine entered there was the usual family aloofness in her face, but also a new element of alleviation. Always plastic as the compound from which she derived her name she had now reached five feet seven and a half inches, and from the crest of her unutterably pullulating womanhood could afford to look down impersonally on her maiden aunts as they struggled in the trough like square pegs in a round hole.
The spectacle of burning leather was in her nostrils, and the vile smell of it gave her an insight into the situation. Plunging her Aunt's best silver-plated sugar-tongs into the flames, she rescued her shrivelled treasure, waved it above the coming tempest like a brand, and faced them, rigid with wrath, half-seas-over with the glamour of things.
An odd, earnest, ineffable look jumped into her eyes, changing their grey to pitch-black, with patches of ethereal blue, where the soul shone through. To their dying day the twins never forgot the smell, or ceased from the pain of their incapacity to grasp the fresh, unmellowed point of view. Points of view are the very dickens.
At last she got less rigid, and became nasty in soft, sweet, labial gutturals, like the whoop of a bull-frog on the sleepy pool just above the dam.
"Is this well-born and well-bred in you, I ask?" There was a defiant abasement in her tone. "Of course you can't help it. You never loved! Pooh!"
The two elder Miss Demnings crushed the fledgling secret of the late curate into its nest, and vituperated till they fell short of matter, being but poorly winded. "Unregenerate—abandoned—viper—alleviator! Pass from our twin presence!"
Margerine moved toward the door; then, by a quaint habit that was a third nature to her (she had two others), she stood there absently, ajar and aloof. Her air of distinction came right out through her wretched frock. Then she went to the drawing-room, singeing her Pagan cheek with the smouldering volume, her young, expansive brain hot with the thought that there were no other copies in the village. "Unless he sends for another from town I shall never be able to keep up my unreasoning, palpitating ecstasy. I must have some ventilation for my inevitableness, or burst."
She rang for fresh tea. The crumpets were crystal-cold. She tasted one, and had a qualm, as if her sympathies were getting enlarged. For a moment she wondered what a headache such as she had read about in books could be like. The next, she was down by the trout-stream, familiar in all she-notes, and lay there gurgling with gutturals.
The peculiarity of Chamois Hyde was that he could not bear making other people—college dons, for instance—ridiculous. About himself it did not so much matter. Oxford had succeeded Eton, and hard on the heels of a good degree had come a cropper in the hunting-field, a nurse, a complicated kiss, a proposal, marriage, disillusionment, in the order named. A poorer, singler man, with the same prancing tip-toe spirit, would have lost all sense of decency, and written a book. But being rich, and, by profession, married, he also was on his way to the usual trout-stream. Which was a thousand pities, and comes into the next chapter.
"ALL'S WELL!"
Cockney Volunteer (on Sentry go). "Halt! Who goes there?"
Rustic. "It's all roight, Man. Oi cooms along 'ere ev'ry Maarnin'!"
