And Lady Grace resumed a brown-holland apron and bib, and opening her hands with a laugh, showed their black insides, then took up her implements.
“Oh, do—do let me try,” was Kate’s next cry; “one little bit to show Sylvia Wardour.”
With one voice the three sisters protested that she had better not; she was not properly equipped, and would ink herself all over. If she would pin down a leaf upon the scrap she held up, Grace should spatter it for her, and they would make it up into anything she liked.
But this did not satisfy Kate at all; the pinning out of the leaf was stupid work compared with the glory of making the ink fly. In vain did Adelaide represent that all the taste and skill was in the laying out the leaves, and pinning them down, and that anyone could put on the ink; in vain did Mary represent the dirtiness of the work: this was the beauty of it in her eyes; and the sight of the black dashes sputtering through the comb filled her with emulation; so that she entreated, almost piteously, to be allowed to “do” an ivy loaf, which she had hastily, and not very carefully, pinned out with Mary’s assistance—that is, she had feebly and unsteadily stuck every pin, and Mary had steadied them.
The new friends consented, seeing how much she was set on it; but Fanny, who had returned from the nursery, insisted on precautions—took off the jacket, turned up the frock sleeves, and tied on an apron; though Kate fidgeted all the time, as if a great injury were being inflicted on her; and really, in her little frantic spirit, thought Lady Fanny a great torment, determined to delay her delight till her aunt should go away and put a stop to it.
When once she had the brush, she was full of fun and merriment, and kept her friends much amused by her droll talk, half to them, half to her work.
“There’s a portentous cloud, isn’t there? An inky cloud, if ever there was one! Take care, inhabitants below; growl, growl, there’s the thunder; now comes the rain; hail, hail, all hail, like the beginning of Macbeth.”
“Which the Frenchman said was in compliment to the climate,” said Fanny; at which the whole company fell into convulsions of laughing; and neither Kate nor Grace exactly knew what hands or brush or comb were about; but whereas the little De La Poers had from their infancy laughed almost noiselessly, and without making faces, Kate for her misfortune had never been broken of a very queer contortion of her lips, and a cackle like a bantam hen’s.
When this unlucky cackle had been several times repeated, it caused Lady Barbara, who had been sitting with her back to the inner room, to turn round.
Poor Lady Barbara! It would not be easy to describe her feelings when she saw the young lady, whom she had brought delicately blue and white, like a speedwell flower, nearly as black as a sweep.