Dulcie opened her blue eyes wide.
"Do I circle round Carmel? Well, really, and why shouldn't I like her? She's my cousin, and a jolly good sort too! I believe she'll give us all a far better time at the Chase than Everard would have done. He always wanted everything just his own way. None of us ever had an innings when he was at home. I never could see why the eldest of a family should lord it so over the others."
"You never had any proper sense of propriety!" retorted Lilias indignantly. "I believe in keeping up the traditions of the Ingletons, and the estate has always descended strictly in the male line. It's only right it should have been left to Everard instead of to a girl, and I'll always say so. There!"
Dulcie shrugged her shoulders.
"Say what you like, Sister o' Mine! The twentieth century is different from the Middle Ages, and people don't bother so much nowadays as they did about descent and all that. The owner of an estate hasn't to fight for it. Oh yes, of course I'm glad I'm an Ingleton, but Carmel's an Ingleton too, as much as we are, and if the Chase is hers we can't help it, and we may just as well make the best of it!"
With which piece of philosophy, Dulcie turned away, leaving Lilias to shake her head over the decay of family feeling, and the degeneracy of younger sisters.
It was perhaps Carmel's rendering of the Pastorale dance that suggested to Miss Walters a scheme of entertainment for the garden fête which the girls were to give in aid of the "Homes for Waifs and Strays." She decided that the garden of Chilcombe Hall would make an excellent background for some classic representations, and that nothing could be prettier than old Greek costumes. By a stroke of great good luck she managed to engage Miss Adams, a former pupil who had been studying classic dancing in Paris, to come for a few weeks and train the performers. Miss Adams was a tremendous enthusiast, and arrived full of ideas which she was burning to teach to the school. The girls were delighted with her methods. It was quite a new phase of dancing to trip barefooted on the lawn, holding up garlands of flowers. They liked the exercises which she gave them for the cultivation of grace, and practised classic attitudes on all occasions, with more or less success.
"You go about the school so exactly like Minerva!" complained Noreen to Phillida, rather dismayed by the sudden change in her lively friend from bounding spirits to a statuesque pose. "Need you always walk as if you were thinking of the shape of your ankles?"
Phillida shook her head carefully, so as not to disarrange the Greek fillet she was wearing.
"It's been too hot lately to tear round and play tennis. I think, too, that what Miss Adams says is quite right. English girls are lacking in grace and dignity. Just look at the way Ida and Joyce are flopping about now. An artist would have fits to see them!"