“Yes, indeed we were,” I answered heartily, putting my arms round her. The flame of my affection for Irais burns very brightly on the day of her arrival; besides, this time I have prudently provided against her sinning with the salt-cellars by ordering them to be handed round like vegetable dishes. We had finished tea and she had gone up to her room to dress before Minora and her bicycle were got here. I hurried out to meet her, feeling sorry for her, plunged into a circle of strangers at such a very personal season as Christmas. But she was not very shy; indeed, she was less shy than I was, and lingered in the hall, giving the servants directions to wipe the snow off the tyres of her machine before she lent an attentive ear to my welcoming remarks.
“I couldn’t make your man understand me at the station,” she said at last, when her mind was at rest about her bicycle; “I asked him how far it was, and what the roads were like, and he only smiled. Is he German? But of course he is—how odd that he didn’t understand. You speak English very well,—very well indeed, do you know.” By this time we were in the library, and she stood on the hearth-rug warming her back while I poured her out some tea.
“What a quaint room,” she remarked, looking round, “and the hall is so curious too. Very old, isn’t it? There’s a lot of copy here.”
The Man of Wrath, who had been in the hall on her arrival and had come in with us, began to look about on the carpet. “Copy?” he inquired, “Where’s copy?”
“Oh—material, you know, for a book. I’m just jotting down what strikes me in your country, and when I have time shall throw it into book form.” She spoke very loud, as English people always do to foreigners.
“My dear,” I said breathlessly to Irais, when I had got into her room and shut the door and Minora was safely in hers, “what do you think—she writes books!”
“What—the bicycling girl?”
“Yes—Minora—imagine it!”
We stood and looked at each other with awestruck faces.
“How dreadful!” murmured Irais. “I never met a young girl who did that before.”