“Ah! you should hear Miss Twinkleton,” often nodding her head, and much enjoying the Lumps, “bore about them, and then you wouldn’t ask. Tiresome old burying-grounds! Isises, and Ibises, and Cheopses, and Pharaohses; who cares about them? And then there was Belzoni, or somebody, dragged out by the legs, half-choked with bats and dust. All the girls say: Serve him right, and hope it hurt him, and wish he had been quite choked.”
The two youthful figures, side by side, but not now arm-in-arm, wander discontentedly about the old Close; and each sometimes stops and slowly imprints a deeper footstep in the fallen leaves.
“Well!” says Edwin, after a lengthy silence. “According to custom. We can’t get on, Rosa.”
Rosa tosses her head, and says she don’t want to get on.
“That’s a pretty sentiment, Rosa, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“If I say what, you’ll go wrong again.”
“You’ll go wrong, you mean, Eddy. Don’t be ungenerous.”
“Ungenerous! I like that!”
“Then I don’t like that, and so I tell you plainly,” Rosa pouts.