The state of Legs’ affections, I am bound to add, aggravated the sultriness of the weather, and made me feel exactly 350 (three hundred and fifty) years old. To take it at its best, he was embarked on a violent flirtation with a dreadful girl; to take it at its worst, he was falling in love with her. She is the daughter of a neighbouring minute squire, who owns three turnip-fields, and calls it shooting. Legs shot over it the other day, and after walking over the whole estate twice, got back to The Grange in time for lunch. This was before I returned from Scotland, or I should have tried to prevent it. Probably I should not have succeeded.
The neighbouring squire’s name is Ampthump. I know quite well that it is not his fault, but that, wedded to what he is and a German wife, makes me unable to like him. His wife makes incredible quantities of jam, which, again, is an innocent pursuit; and Charlotte, the daughter, talks German to Legs, who I wish was more like Goethe. The whole family, in fact, as may have been already perceived, appear to me to be simply intolerable.
The attachment also has already led to equivocation on the part of Legs. He pretends that he talks to Charlotte because it is so good for his German. He knows that it is not so, and I know it is not so, and I think he knows that I know it is not so. But it really looks at the moment that unless they marry each other there will be a broken or, at any rate, a cracked heart. I only hope it will not be Legs’. I don’t care the least what happens to Charlotte’s heart. It may, however, be only a flirtation, in which case there probably will not even be a crack. Legs will wake up one morning, and after handling some precious withered flowers will wonder what on earth they ever meant to him, and throw them in the fire. Or Charlotte will do something equally desperate. That is my hope; my fear is that they are falling in love with each other.
This narrative, it should be understood, is the gist of what I have been saying fragmentarily to Helen. She considers it a cynical view, which alarms me, since I hold the creed that all cynics are properly and irretrievably damned. To-night Legs went to bed early, with dishevelled hair, a wakeful eye, and a gale of sighs, and I came upstairs to talk to Helen about it all while she brushed her hair.
‘You are quite ridiculous about it,’ she said. ‘Because you happen not to like the Ampses (we have agreed on that abbreviation), you think that they are unlovable. Legs has proved the contrary. Besides, what on earth does her name matter, if she is going to change it?’
I groaned intentionally, and in a graveyard manner.
‘Do you mean that you think Legs is in love with her?’ I asked.
‘Yes; at least, I hope so. He had a long talk with me to-day. He said he felt it was time he settled down. What a darling! Just twenty! I wish I was.’
Most of this was irrelevant. I tried to pick out pieces that were not.
‘Of course, her name doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Her name might be—— Well, you can’t do worse than Ampthump, and it does happen to be exactly that. But her face is like a ham——’