Beatrice could not very easily call up a smile, but she made an effort, and succeeded, while she said, “I should have complimented you on the increased wisdom of your looks. I did not know the shape of your head was so like papa’s.”
“Is Aunt Geoffrey come?” asked Fred.
“Yes,” said his sister: “but mamma thinks you had better not see her till to-morrow.”
“I wish Uncle Geoffrey was not going,” said Fred. “Nobody else has the least notion of making one tolerably comfortable.”
“O, your mamma, Fred!” said Queen Bee.
“O yes, mamma, of course! But then she is getting fagged.”
“Mamma says she is quite unhappy to have kept him so long from his work in London,” said Henrietta; “but I do not know what we should have done without him.”
“I do not know what we shall do now,” said Fred, in a languid and doleful tone.
The Queen Bee, thinking this a capital opportunity, spoke with almost alarmed eagerness, “O yes, Fred, you will get on famously; you will enjoy having my mamma so much, and you are so much better already, and Philip Carey manages you so well—”
“Manages!” said Fred; “ay, and I’ll tell you how, Queenie; just as the man managed his mare when he fed her on a straw a day. I believe he thinks I am a ghool, and can live on a grain of rice. I only wish he knew himself what starvation is. Look here! you can almost see the fire through my hand, and if I do but lift up my head, the whole room is in a merry-go-round. And that is nothing but weakness; there is nothing else on earth the matter with me, except that I am starved down to the strength of a midge!”