'Ah, you should hear Turk say it! It would fill a large page. Do you remember when you first learnt to write?'

'Yes.'

'And how, with your left arm sprawling over the table, and your left ear listening for something you never heard, and your eyes as staring wide open as ever they could be, and your tongue half out of your mouth, you dug your pen into the copy-book to produce your first O, which took about five minutes in the making, and then came out squabbled? That's the way Gus says his O's. He takes a long time over them. Now Brinsley's different.'

'Brinsley?'

'My brother. He's sensible. He plays walking gentlemen in the new style, and rattles off what he has to say quite in the elegant way--as if he didn't care a bit for it, you know. Turk sneers at him (dramatically, my dear), and says that the new school of acting is the ruin of the profession. But to come back to the Bashful Lover. You shall play it, my dear. Gus shall write the piece.'

'Gus?'

'One of my brothers. Gus can write anything--tragedies, melodramas, farces--and he shall write The Bashful Lover, after the style of The Conjugal Lesson. One scene, and only two performers--you and Jessie. That would be nice, as Jessie says. You shall quarrel, of course, and make it up, and quarrel again, and snub each other, and sulk, and say spiteful things (Gus will see to all that), but--don't look so glum!--it shall all come right in the end. You shall drop into each other's arms and kiss, and while you are folding her to your heart (that's the style nowadays, my dear), the curtain shall fall. We'll have a select audience--none of the boys, for that would spoil it, eh? but Gus--he must be present as the author. There'll be me, and Florry, and Matty, and Rosy, and Nelly, and Sophy, and we'll all applaud at the right places, you may be sure.'

Miss West counted the names on her fingers as she went over them; the young ladies who bore them were all seated round the table and about the room, engaged in various ways. One was cutting-out stars of paper tinsel, and gluing them on to a gauze dress; another was making dancing shoes; another was amusing herself with a cardboard stage and cardboard characters, which she drew on and off by means of tin slides. Miss West, who also had an article of female attire, in an unfinished state, in her lap, which she worked upon in the intervals of her conversation, called these young ladies by name, one by one, and desired each to perform a magnificent curtsy to me, which the little misses, the eldest of whom could not have been more than fourteen years of age, did in grand style, worthy of the finest ladies in the land. I was somewhat bewildered at the extent of Miss West's family, and I asked if there were any more of them.

'Heaps, my dear,' she complacently replied; 'there are nineteen of us altogether--eleven boys and eight girls, and all straight made, with the exception of me. I'm crooked. My legs are wrong. But I've been on the stage too. I played an old witch for an entire season, and got great applause. People in the house wondered how I could keep doubled up almost for such a long time together; I was on in one scene for twenty minutes; they didn't know I was doubled up naturally.'

In proof of her words Miss West rose, and hobbled to the end of the kitchen as if in search of something, and hobbled back, the most genial and good-humoured of old witches. She was barely four feet in height, and was a queer little figure indeed, but her face was bright, and her eyes were bright I could not help liking the little woman, and I told her so.