"Cressida, my sweet!" said the authoress, plaintively; "if you can possibly wish to go, do wish; it would be so much more convenient for dear little mother. I never coerce her, on principle, Lady George--she is the only tie I have to life."
"Separated from her husband," put in Mrs. Vane's next-door neighbour, in the same self-complacent whisper. "It is quite the proper thing when you write, you know."
"That is what Lady George says also," broke in Mrs. Woodward, a little spitefully. "And I tell her that children were made to obey their parents----"
"Should be made to obey them, you mean, dear Mrs. Woodward," interrupted her hostess, rising to the bait; "but, as I say, it depends upon experience. You may have found it necessary with--with yours, but mine----"
"And mine also!" broke in the lady who wrote, enthusiastically. "Cressida's mind is so beautiful in its intense naturalness, so delicate in texture. It is the instinctive shyness of a sensitive organism which----" She started, and turned round, for a loud, full, yet childish voice rose confidently above her words.
"Blazeth' goin' to kiss the little gurl, then she won't be flighted, but come along o' Blazeths."
And she did, hand in hand, admiringly, while he cracked his whip and cried, "Ger'rup!" to amuse her.
"And he can do old Angus awful well, too," whispered Eve to her companion, as they passed out of the door. "We'll get him to do it by the burn when Mary isn't looking. Mary doesn't like it, you know, because her young man is a shepherd, too; but he really is quite a genteel young fellar, and kept company with the under 'rouse last year at the Forest--that's your place, isn't it?"
"It's a deal bigger than this," remarked the other. "And we have deers and grouses."
So the game of brag--which children play more naïvely than their elders--began, while the authoress was explaining at length how it came about that Cressida had consented to Blasius's methods of persuasion.