THE PICNIC AT THE FALLS
The morning rose in mist; the sun moved upwards and still the mist lingered, as if anxious to drape and hide the rough edges of this oddly-arranged picnic.
Sometimes the wagonette in front was lost to sight by a rolling curtain of gauze; sometimes a wind swept the road clear and then the children waved hats and kissed hands to each other.
Dora and Beatrice were visions of beauty and fashion in smartly-cut linen gowns and the latest thing in stocks and belts and shoes and hats and gloves and parasols; not over-dressed in the least, but so correct, so up-to-date, so “well-planned,” Miss Bibby involuntarily drew a heavy sigh as she looked at them.
In their turn the two young girls pleasantly patronized Miss Bibby. It was the first time they had seen her, though they had heard of her often, and indeed were a little anxious to meet her, for Mrs. Gowan had teased Hugh [p244] before them, ever since the interview, about the “fair and mysterious Miss Bibby.” But this figure in its plain blue serge and its out-of-date, if spotless, cuffs and collar! This gentle, tired face with faint lines at the eye corners and its brown hair simply waved back from the forehead instead of bulging out on a frame as Fashion insisted!
“We need not have been afraid,” they whispered to each other.
Effie and Florence, second and third in age of the five little Gowans and mustering some fifteen years between them, sat up on the box next the driver and whispered together. All the way they hardly moved their eyes from the wagonette in front, where the faces of their loved little friends appeared and disappeared like flowers of the vapour.
The driver was an unemotional man, long used to being squeezed up on his seat by more people than that seat was ever built to accommodate; used, too, to having his ears filled with every sort and condition of conversation. City men talked to each other beside him of stocks and shares; tourists compared the views along the roads with New Zealand views, and American ones and German and Swiss: mothers babbled of their babies and their servants; girls whispered to girls of “Jack” and “Jim”—lovers—and these allowed him more seat space—of love.
[p245]
Why should he lend a more than quarter ear as usual to the chatter of two little bits of girls? How should he know the demure holland frocks beside him covered revolutionists?
Hugh started off his first party, Paul and Lynn, Muffie and Max and Miss Bibby.