"You never do except when you are wished to be silent; and then your tongue goes like any race horse."
"Does it? Well, like Gilpin's,
'It carries weight: it rides a race,
'Tis for a thousand pound?'
—and I only wish it were. Heigh ho! if I could but earn a thousand pounds!"
Selina was too vexed to reply and for five quiet minutes Hilary bent over her Homer which Mr. Lyon had taken such pleasure in teaching her, because he said, she learned it faster than any of his grammar school boys. She had forgotten all domestic grievances in a vision of Thetis and the water nymphs; and was repeating to herself, first in the sonorous Greek and then in Pope's small but sweet English, that catalogue of oceanic beauties ending with
"Black Janira and Janassa fair,
And Amatheia with her amber hair."
"Black, did you say? I'm sure she was as black as a chimney sweep all to-day. And her pinafore"
"Her what? Oh, Elizabeth, you mean—"
"Her pinafore had three rents in it, which she never thinks of mending though I gave her needles and thread myself a week ago. But she does not know how to use them any more than a baby."
"Possibly, nobody ever taught her."