“It was about a book, mostly.”
“Ah! story-books, story-books, story-books!” Mrs. Tregaskis shook her head good-humouredly. “I suspect both these little people of being book-worms.”
The laugh in her kindly gaze was inflexible, and Lady Argent responded to it by a faint tinkle of mirth that Ludovic savagely told himself was sycophantic.
“Well, I was a bit of a book-worm myself, once upon a time. No, no, don’t ask me how long ago.” No one showed any signs of doing so. “It must have been quite a hundred years ago, since I wasn’t much bigger than Frances is now, if you can imagine such a thing.”
She gave her ready, jolly laugh with both hands on her wide hips.
“I used to sit up in an old pear-tree in the orchard (down tü Tintagel ’twas, ma dear), and read everything I could find—not the sort of story-books you children of to-day get hold of, I can assure you, but books that you’d think very stiff and dry, I expect.”
She was now addressing herself, almost in narrative form, to Rosamund and Frances, but Ludovic noted with venomous satisfaction that the politely unresponsive expression on both faces seemed to discourage her slightly.
She turned to Lady Argent again, with another slight laugh, as it were of proud apology for her own literary infancy.
“I really believe I’d worked my way through the whole of Motley’s ‘Dutch Republic’ before I was ten years old, and as for Don Quixote, he was my hero. In fact my lightest literature was Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queen,’ most of which I knew by heart.”
“My dear! At ten years old! Just think of it!” This from Lady Argent. Ludovic contented himself with the bitter ejaculation: