“Why do they put them there?” she asked, with wide-open eyes. “What is she like?”
Lord Norman tilted his hat over his eyes and considered.
“What is she like? Oh, she’s fair, with a lot of yellow hair like spun silk; and she’s tall. It’s difficult to describe her. Trafford once said that she was a daughter of the gods. I don’t know what he meant, excepting that she was very graceful, and stately, and all that.”
“A daughter of the gods,” she repeated. It is needless to say that she had never heard of Tennyson; but the well-known and oft-quoted line conveyed something of its meaning to her. “And can she ride and shoot and swim? Could she climb that tree there?”
She did not ask because she herself could do these things, but because she wanted to know more about this grand young lady who was “a daughter of the gods,” whose hair was like spun silk, and whose portrait was in the shop windows.
“Yes; she can ride after a fashion, on a very tame gee-gee, and she goes round the park like they do in a circus. As to shooting,” he smiled. “I should like to see Lady Ada fire a gun; ‘let it off,’ she’d call it; and she couldn’t climb anything, except the stairs, to save her life.”
Esmeralda looked surprised and thoughtful.
“I don’t think much of her,” she remarked, not contemptuously, but as if she were stating an unprejudiced opinion. “And it’s only because she’s pretty that she’s a belle? Do you think her so very beautiful?”
“I did,” he said; “I thought her the loveliest girl in the world; but I don’t now.”
“Why?” she asked, looking at him with surprise.