“Nay, you can’t deceive me while you have a transparent face. Trust me for finding out whether you are bored or not. Besides, I would not pay so bad a compliment to your taste as to think otherwise.”
“How do you know I was not exercising the taste of Rubens himself? I was actually admiring you all, and thinking how like it all was to that great print from one of his pictures; the building with its dark gloomy roof, and open sides, the twilight, the solitary dispersed snow-flakes, the haze of dust, the sleek cattle, and their long white horns.”
“Quite poetical,” said Queen Bee, in a short, dry, satirical manner. “How charmed Jessie must have been!”
“Why?” said Fred, rather provoked.
“Such masterly eyes are not common among our gentlemen. You will be quite her phoenix; and how much ‘Thomson’s Seasons’ you will have to hear! I dare say you have had it already—
‘Now, shepherds, to your helpless charge be kind!’”
“Well, very good advice, too,” said Fred.
“I hate and detest Thomson,” said Beatrice; “above all, for travestying Ruth into ‘the lovely young Lavinia;’ so whenever Jessie treated me to any of her quotations, I criticised him without mercy, and at last I said, by great good luck, that the only use of him was to serve as an imposition for young ladies at second-rate boarding schools. It was a capital hit, for Alex found out that it was the way she learnt so much of him, and since that time I have heard no more of ‘Jemmy Thomson! Jemmy Thomson! O!’”
The laughter which followed this speech had a tone in it, which, reaching Mr. Geoffrey Langford, who was walking a little in front with his mother, made him suspect that the young people were getting into such spirits as were not quite Sunday-like; and, turning round, he asked them some trifling question, which made him a party to the conversation, and brought it back to a quieter, though not less merry tone.
Dinner was at five, and Henrietta was dressed so late that Queen Bee had to come up to summon her, and bring her down after every one was in the dining-room—an entrée all the more formidable, because Mr. Franklin was dining there, as well as Uncle Roger and Alexander.