She had begged the Dusautoys to make her leisure profitable, and spent much of her time upon the schools, on her little patient in Tibb’s Alley, and in going about among the poor; she visited her old shopkeeper friends, and drank tea with them much oftener than gratified Mr. Kendal, talking so openly of the pleasure of seeing them again, that Albinia sometimes thought the blood of the O’Mores was a little chafed.
‘There,’ said Genevieve, completing a housewife, filled with needles ready threaded, ‘I wonder whether the omnibus is too protestant to leave a parcel at the convent?’
‘I don’t think its scruples of conscience would withstand sixpence,’ said Albinia.
‘You might post it for less than that,’ said Sophy.
‘Don’t you know,’ said Ulick O’More, who was playing with the little Awk in the window, ‘that the feminine mind loves expedients? It would be less commonplace to confide the parcel to the conductor, than merely let him receive it as guard of the mail bag and servant of the public.’
‘Exactly,’ laughed Genevieve. ‘Think of the moral influence of being selected as bearer of a token of tenderness to my aunt on her fete, instead of being treated as a mere machine, devoid of human sympathies.’
‘Sophy, where were we reading of a nation which gives the simplest transaction the air of a little romance?’ said Ulick.
‘And I have heard of a nation which denudes every action of sentiment, and leaves you the tree without the leaves,’ was Genevieve’s retort.
‘That misses fire, Miss Durant; my nation does everything by the soul, nothing by mechanism.’
‘When they do do it.’