Immensely relieved, for a search for a doctor in hedges and ditches would surely have been a thing of little profit and much fatigue, I sat down in one of the only three chairs that were at all comfortable and spent the rest of the afternoon in fitful argument with Jellaby as he came and went, and in sustained, and not, I trust, unsuccessful efforts to establish my friendship with Lord Sigismund on such a footing that an invitation to meet his Serene Aunt, the Princess of Grossburg-Niederhausen, would be the harmonious result.
The ladies were busied devising methods for the more rapid relief of the unhappy and still obstinately swollen fledgling.
There was no supper except ginger-biscuits.
“You can’t expect it,” said Edelgard, when I asked her (very distantly) about it, “with sickness in the house.”
“What house?” I retorted, pardonably snappy.
I hope never to revisit Dundale.
CHAPTER X
LET me earnestly urge any of my hearers who may be fired by my example to follow it, never to go to Dundale. It is a desolate place, and a hungry place; and a place, moreover, greatly subject to becoming enveloped in a sort of universal gray cloud, emitting a steady though fine drizzle and accounted for—which made it none the less wet—by persons who knew everything, like Jellaby, as being a sea-mist.
I am no doubt very stupid, and therefore was unable to understand why there should be a sea-mist when there was no sea.
“Well, we’re in Sussex now you know,” said Jellaby, on my saying something of the sort to him.