The Boodie takes no notice of this enquiry. She puckers up her smooth brows as if puzzled, and then says, slowly—
"I don't believe one word of it!"
"Of what?" says Gower. Everybody by this time is looking at the Boodie, and the Boodie is steadfastly regarding Stephen Gower.
"It wasn't true what she said," goes on the Boodie, meditatively, "because you have hair on your lip. Girls don't have hair on their lips—do they?"
"Not as a general rule," says Dicky Browne. "There have been noble exceptions, but unhappily they are rare. Miss Gaunt is perhaps the only girl down here who can boast of hirsute adornment, and the growth upon her upper lip is not to be despised. But then she belongs to the higher and more powerful class of females, in fact, as Wordsworth so touchingly expresses it, she
'Wears upon her forehead clear
The freedom of a mountaineer.'
I always—mildly—think Wordsworth must have been acquainted with Miss Gaunt."
"Go on," says Stephen to the Boodie, who is still lost in thought. "You have not yet told me what it is you disbelieve."
"It was something Portia said," returns the Boodie, composedly.
"That I said! surely you are mistaken, darling," says Portia.