‘Pray do you partake it?’ asked Percy. ‘How do you feel after it?’
‘Why, certainly, I never met with a person of more conversation,’ said John.
‘Delicately put!’ said Arthur, laughing heartily. ‘Why, she had even begun lecturing my father on the niggers!’
‘I would not be Lady Elizabeth!’ said Mr. Fotheringham.
‘Those romantic exaggerations of friendship are not satisfactory,’ said John. ‘Emma is too timid to be eccentric herself at present; but a governing spirit might soon lead her on.’
‘That it might,’ said Theodora, ‘as easily as I used to drag her, in spite of her terrors, through all the cows in the park. I could be worse to her than any cow; and this Ursula—or what is her outlandish name, Violet?’
‘Theresa; Sarah Theresa.’
‘Well, really,’ said John, ‘it is not for the present company to criticize outlandish names.’
‘No,’ said Arthur, ‘it was a happy instinct that made us give my boy a good rational working-day name, fit to go to school in, and no choice either to give him the opportunity of gainsaying it, like Emma’s friend, and some others—Sir Percival that is to be! A hero of the Minerva press!’
‘No, indeed—if I was to be Sir Anything, which probably I never shall be, I would hold, like my forefathers, to my good old Antony, which it was not my doing to disregard.’