The Oxford girls were safe indoors; Isa working chess problems with another of the lads, Avice keeping Jane company over the putting the little ones to sleep—in Mount Lebanon, as they call the Druce lodging—and Pica preserving microscopic objects. “Isn’t she awful?” said one of those pupils. “She’s worse than all the dons in Cambridge. She wants to be at it all day long, and all through the vacation.”
They perfectly flee from her. They say she is always whipping out a microscope and lecturing upon protoplasms—and there is some truth in the accusation. She is almost as bad on the emancipation of women, on which there is a standing battle, in earnest with Jane—in joke with Metelill; but it has, by special orders, to be hushed at dinner, because it almost terrifies grandmamma. I fear Pica tries to despise her!
This morning the girls are all out on the beach in pairs and threes, the pupils being all happily shut up with their tutor. I see the invalid lady creep out with her beach-rest from the intermediate house, and come down to her usual morning station in the shade of a rock, unaware, poor thing, that it has been monopolised by Isa and Metelill. Oh, girls! why don’t you get up and make room for her? No; she moves on to the next shady place, but there Pica has a perfect fortification of books spread on her rug, and Charley is sketching on the outskirts, and the fox-terrier barks loudly. Will she go on to the third seat? where I can see, though she cannot, Jane and Avice sitting together, and Freddy shovelling sand at their feet. Ah! at last she is made welcome. Good girls! They have seated her and her things, planted a parasol to shelter her from the wind, and lingered long enough not to make her feel herself turning them out before making another settlement out of my sight.
Three o’clock.—I am sorry to say Charley’s sketch turned into a caricature of the unprotected female wandering in vain in search of a bit of shelter, with a torn parasol, a limp dress, and dragging rug, and altogether unspeakably forlorn. It was exhibited at the dinner-table, and elicited peals of merriment, so that we elders begged to see the cause of the young people’s amusement. My blood was up, and when I saw what it was, I said—
“I wonder you like to record your own discourtesy, to call it nothing worse.”
“But, Aunt Charlotte,” said Metelill in her pretty pleading way, “we did not know her.”
“Well, what of that?” I said.
“Oh, you know it is only abroad that people expect that sort of things from strangers.”
“One of the worst imputations on English manners I ever heard,” I said.
“But she was such a guy!” cried Charley. “Mother said she was sure she was not a lady.”