CHAPTER XII
A little grain of conscience made him sour.
Tennyson
‘A penny for your thoughts, Cilly,’ said Horatia, sliding in on the slippery boards of a great bare room of a lodging-house at the celebrated Spa of Spitzwasserfitzung.
‘My thoughts? I was trying to recollect the third line of
“Sated at home, of wife and children tired,
Sated abroad, all seen and naught admired.”’
‘Bless me, how grand! Worth twopence. So good how Shakspeare, as the Princess Ottilie would say!’
‘Twopence for its sincerity! It is not for your sake that I am not in Old England.’
‘Nor for that of the three flaxen-haired princesses, with religious opinions to be accommodated to those of the crowned heads they may marry?’
‘I’m sick of the three, and their raptures. I wish I was as ignorant as you, and that Shakspeare had never been read at the Holt.’
‘This is a sudden change. I thought Spitzwasserfitzung and its princesses had brought halcyon days.’