Alice understood it also, and yet it behoved her to hold herself well up and be cheerful. “I like Beetham people best myself,” she said, “but then it is because I don’t know any other. I remember going to Brook Park once, when there was a party of children, a hundred years ago, and I thought it quite a paradise. There was a profusion of strawberries by which my imagination has been troubled ever since. You’ll just be in time for the strawberries, Major Rossiter.” He had always been John till quite lately,—John with the memories of childhood; but now he had become Major Rossiter.
She went out into the garden with him for a moment as he took his leave,—not quite alone, as a little boy of two years old was clinging to her hand. “If I had my way,” she said, “I’d have my neighbours everywhere,—at any distance. I envy a man chiefly for that.”
“Those one loves best should be very near, I think.”
“Those one loves best of all? Oh yes, so that one may do something. It wouldn’t do not to have you every day, would it, Bobby?” Then she allowed the willing little urchin to struggle up into her arms and to kiss her, all smeared as was his face with bread-and-butter.
“Your mother meant to say that I was running away from my old friends.”
“Of course she did. You see, you loom so very large to us here. You are—such a swell, as Dick says, that we are a little sore when you pass us by. Everybody likes to be bowed to by royalty. Don’t you know that? Brook Park is, of course, the proper place for you; but you don’t expect but what we are going to express our little disgusts and little prides when we find ourselves left behind!” No words could have less declared her own feelings on the matter than those she was uttering; but she found herself compelled to laugh at him, lest, in the other direction, something of tenderness might escape her, whereby he might be injured worse than by her raillery. In nothing that she might say could there be less of real reproach to him than in this.
“I hate that word ‘swell,’” he said.
“So do I.”
“Then why do you use it?”
“To show you how much better Brook Park is than Beetham. I am sure they don’t talk about swells at Brook Park.”