The hill got rather steeper.
‘Go on,’ said I. ‘How slowly you walk!’
‘Yes, but I have to do all the talking. You have no conversation. Oh dear, what a devil I am! Aren’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘There! I told you nobody loved me. Oh, look! we are going to have a real red sunset. All the hills are getting molten, as if they were red-hot and glowing.’
She was feeling a little better—not much, but a little. We had come up the two hundred feet of steep down-side as if we had been storming a breach. To walk very fast up a hill makes all proper people feel better, unless they have heart disease, in which case they die, and so, we hope, feel better also. But for those who have not heart disease, and want to feel better, the prescription is confidently recommended.
‘And then that awful girl!’ she went on. ‘You insisted on being neighbourly, as you call it, with the Ampses, and this is the result.’
‘There has been none at present.’
‘No; but you tell me to ask the family to dinner on the very day that Legs comes down. Oh dear, what a heavenly evening! I should so enjoy it if everything wasn’t wrong. Look at the sky! Fifty thousand little pink, fluffy angels floating about in it! Do you want to go right to the top of the hill?’
‘Yes, right to the top. Then I shall begin to answer you back.’