"Why, of course I didn't intend to be out of the concerts," protested Mona plaintively. "I only thought I might drop my lessons and give up practising for a while—just during the tennis season, you know."
"Oh! I dare say! And you think Miss Jackson will let you play at recitals when you've never practised a note? Happy are the ignorant, indeed! Don't you know she wouldn't allow Margaret Hales a part in that trio, when poor old Mag had only been away ten days with 'flu'? As for putting on a girl who actually wasn't having lessons, why, the idea's preposterous! No, take your granny's advice, and knock off maths, or chemistry, or anything you can induce Miss Cartwright to let you throw overboard, but stick tight to your piano."
"True, O Queen! Yours are the words of wisdom, I admit. It's the half-hour's practising before breakfast that I so particularly loathe and abhor."
"Well, now the mornings are light, you needn't growl!"
"What a Mentor you are! You'll be quoting Dr. Watts to me next:
"'Tis the voice of the sluggard, I heard him complain,
'You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again!'
I don't mind confessing that I hate getting up in the mornings; however sunny they are, it makes no difference. And to have to do it every day for a whole term, and peg away at scales and arpeggios! Ugh! I sometimes wish I'd been born a savage in Central Africa!"
"Then they'd have made you learn the tom-tom, and no doubt that's an instrument that needs perseverance. You can't get out of it, Mona mine! I see nothing for you but a dreary prospect of early rising, and the pursuit of five-finger exercises. It's your hard, cruel, inexorable fate, the chain from which you can't escape."
Mona laughed rather unwillingly: her mirth was never very spontaneous.
"I know it's slavery! Well, I suppose I must live for the summer holidays! They let me lie in bed as long as I like, and it's my ideal of bliss."