“Oh, she’ll do,” responded daddy in an offhand tone, but, as I knew, swelling with pride like a dear old turkey-cock. “She’s not so bad, for a colonial.”
“But she doesn’t look the least colonial, uncle; that is what surprises us so much. Mamma says she cannot understand it. We thought she’d be—well, a little shy and awkward—a little uncomfortable in society—that sort of thing.”
“She’d be her mother’s daughter, wherever she came from,” said father rather shortly, and I felt myself redden at the little minx’s unconscious impertinence.
At dinner I was aware that I was an object of great curiosity and interest, and summoned all my arts to appear calmly unconscious of it. The eyes of one or another were always fixed on my jewels, which must have made a wondrous show in such a breadth of gaslight; and other eyes were sure to be watching furtively every movement I made—to see, I suppose, whether I put my knife into my mouth or used my finger-glass to drink out of. The conversation turned almost entirely upon Australian topics, and my respected relations proved themselves as sublimely and preposterously ignorant of our modern colonial social life as all other stay-at-home Britons that I have met. I was not a bit surprised. I remembered a famous joke in Punch—a sketch of an Australian cousin arriving in a Belgravian drawing-room at the time of afternoon tea, and, being asked to take a cup, replying that he “didn’t mind,” if Bella would give him a handful of tea and a billy that he might boil it in the customary manner on the drawing-room coals (I wonder he didn’t want to go out into the gardens of the square, and cut down a tree to make his fire with). When I reflected that Punch was a journal of public opinion, enjoying an immemorial repute and prestige as a faithful mirror of contemporary manners, I could not wonder that uncle and aunt Goodeve and my cousins were so astonished to see me behaving myself like a civilised being. And what was damper like? asked Bella, as she took a dainty spoonful of ice pudding. And would I tell her how it was made? And how did gold look when it came out of those funny cradles? And was it really good satin and silk and velvet that the rich diggers gave their wives when they married those drabs of emigrant girls, and drank champagne out of buckets at their weddings? And were we not dreadfully afraid to live amongst those wild savages who went about at night spearing the cattle? And was it not very fortunate that uncle Chamberlayne had had a sheep station, since it was never known that they speared sheep?
I had not much patience to go into details about these things; I left it to father, who—though he was old enough to have known better—crammed them with shocking falsehoods, which had the effect of confirming their theories, and of making their hair stand more on end than it did before. The only information I vouchsafed was that I really and truly had seen a live ornithorhyncus, and that, when shot and taken from the river, the smell of its nasty, soft thick body was so unspeakably disgusting that it spoiled my appetite even to think of it.
When I crept into mother’s room, to see how she was and to say good-night—feeling very sleepy at last, for it was one o’clock—I confided to her my first impressions of my cousins.
“They are as kind as kind can be; but oh, mother, they are very silly!” I said despondingly.
“You must not say that until you have had time to know them,” she replied.
“I used to feel at home that I didn’t care for girls,” I went on, “but to-night I feel so more than ever. To see Bertha finicking about the tea cups with those slices of lemon, and talking about the Duchess of Edinburgh and the fashions as if it were a matter of the very last importance, it was so absurd! And she never read a Saturday Review article in her life—she, living in London!”
“There is a great deal else to read in London, Kitty.”