“Intensely nervous!” pronounced the Sibyl (who habitually talked in italics and a lovable Cork brogue), looking at the maze of delicate lines that indicate the high-strung temperament. “Adores her children!”
“Not a bit of it!” says my mother, flinging up her head, in a way she had, like a stag, and regarding with a dauntless eye her two grinning daughters.
The Sibyl swept on, dealing with line and mount and star, going from strength to strength in the exposition till, at the line of the heart, she came to a dead set.
“Oh, Mrs. Somerville! What do I see? Countless flirtations!! And Oh—” (a long squeal of sympathy and excitement) “Four! Yes! One—Two—Three—Four Great Passions!”
At this the ecstasy of my mother knew no bounds. “Four, Miss X.! Are you sure?”
Miss X. was certain. She expounded and amplified, and having put the Four Great Passions on a basis of rock, proceeded with her elucidation of lesser matters; but it was evident that my mother’s attention was no longer hers.
“I’m trying to remember who the Four Passions were,” she said that evening to one of her first cousins (who might be supposed to know something of her guilty past), and to my sister, “There was Charlie B——. He’ll do for one—and L. W.——!—that’s two—and then—Oh, yes!—then there was S. B——! Minnie! Was I in love with S. B——?” She paused for an answer that her cousin was incapable, for more reasons than the obvious one, of giving.
My mother resumed the delicious inquiry.
“Well—” she said, musingly, “Anyhow, that’s only three. Now, who was the fourth?”
My sister Hildegarde, who was young and inclined to be romantic, said languishingly,