"O, I meant nothing about your appearance," replies the boy, looking rather sheepish; "I mean as to sense and cleverness and—and all that sort of thing, you know. Of course Doris is considered the beauty of the family, with her light fluffy hair and her great blue eyes, but to my thinking old Honor is every bit as good-looking. What say you, Molly?"
"She's a dear old Honor, that's what she is," says Molly, looking up and patting her elder sister's hand affectionately. To be sure the effect of this statement is somewhat marred by the fact of the speaker's mouth being full of chestnuts. The sentiment is the same, however, and Dick, banging his hand down on the table, cries triumphantly, "There you are, you see—old again! Now what have you got to say, Miss Honor?"
"That you are a goose and that Molly is another, for if she will persist in tilting her chair like that she will follow Daisy's example and come to the ground."
Molly brings her chair on to its fore-legs with a bang, then proceeds to announce solemnly, "We don't seem to be getting a bit nearer to settling these theatricals. Here's Miss Denison coming back to-morrow expecting us to have arranged everything and to have been rehearsing our parts, and—"
"Parts!" echoes Dick; "how can you call it a part when you have nothing to do but to sit or stand still?"
"Well, it is a part all the same," cries Molly, not to be put down. "Each one is a part of the whole picture, I suppose; so if you can't allow it in one sense you can in another."
"Hum, especially when there is only one person in the picture!" mutters Dick. But here Honor's voice is heard saying, "Well, children, no disputing or we shall never settle anything. Now, who has got the list of the subjects that we made out last night?"
"Here it is," says Doris, who has had it spread out on her knees studying for some time. "Now, first of all, is it quite settled that we are only to have nursery rhymes; or do you think people will think it silly?"
"We might have one or two historical scenes, perhaps," says Honor reflectively.
"Or one or two Shakespearian or Tennysonian," suggests Dick, who has rather high-flown ideas. "Let us do the 'play scene' in Hamlet. I'll be Hamlet, and—I—suppose Doris would have to be Ophelia."