“It is Amanda Fitzallan, coming back to the Welsh cottage where she was nursed, and catching sight of it, you know, raises fluttering emotions in her sensitive bosom,” Rosemary explained, with an injured air.
“Oh! it does, does it? But she wouldn’t hold forth in that way, you know, even if she were badly stage struck or very crazy,” said Wynnette.
“Oh! I thought it was such elegant language!” pleaded Rosemary.
“But she wouldn’t use it! Look here! Do you suppose, when I come back from school, years hence, and catch sight of Mondreer, I should hold forth in that hifaluting style?”
“But what would you say?”
“Nothing, probably; or if I did, it would be: ‘There’s the blessed old barn now, looking as dull and humdrum as it did when we used to go blackberrying and get our ankles full of chego bites. Lord! how many dull days we have passed in that dreary old jail, especially in rainy weather!’ I think that would be about my talk.”
“Oh, Wynnette! you have no sentiment, no reverence, no——”
“Nonsense!” good-humoredly replied the girl, finishing Rosemary’s halting sentence.
The little girl sighed, closed the book and laid it on the table.
“The style of that work is very elegant and refined; and it is better to err on the side of elegance and refinement than on their opposites,” said Miss Grandiere, with her grandest air.