Merle demurred. They always cast her for the “mother” parts, she complained, simply because her hair chose to remain tidier than other people’s. At which thrust, Peter renounced the entire game, and decided she wanted to play at hounds-among-the-undergrowth. Her companions looked puzzled.
“‘The Hound of the d’Urbervilles’? Sleuth-hounds? Hounds of Low? of Ditch? Hounds of Heaven? Or just Faithful Hounds? Peter, please specify, and I might even play at being just one tiny little puppy bloodhound myself.”
In the end Stuart was the entire pack, and Master of the Hounds to boot. And then they abandoned this new sport in favour of the Spanish Armada; sailed ignited fireships down a backwater, and roused volumes of sputtering and inarticulate wrath in the bosom of a mild man of peace whose skiff they had almost set in flames.
Now, subdued to a more twilit mood, they lie dark against the quenched amber and pearl of the sunset; and reviewing their April day, they find it good. Stuart, in ostentatious proof that he needs no rest from his Herculean labours with the pole, has allowed Peter to recline full-length in the punt, her head upon his knees, the while she lazily smokes a cigarette, and complains that his bones penetrate the thickness of four cushions, and hurt the back of her neck.
“Which proves that you are a Princess by birth,” laughs Merle, squatting, a graceful Dryad, on the adjoining bank. “You remember the incident of the pea under the twelve mattresses?”
And now it is that Peter solemnly propounds the question, as to whether (a) consciousness of swank and swagger, and (b) consciousness of the irritation produced in others by swank and swagger, could or could not be held as mitigating circumstances for aforesaid swank and swagger?
“Mitigating circumstances? No, I think not,” thoughtfully Merle raises a dusky purple grape to her crimson lips. The colour-scheme thus presented might have been one of Dulac’s exotic harmonies: blue-green shadow of the Quarry Woods behind; vivid blue jersey; bluish lights in the dense black of her hair. “I should rather say that the consciousness makes one accessory before the fact.”
Stuart joins in; “The form of the question might be altered to this: does my personality justify my swank?” impishly he grins down on the upturned face of Peter across his knees. He is very unlike a man at these minutes; gnome, pixie or hobgoblin might claim him brother.
Peter retorts: “That’s a different thing altogether. And why limit the problem to yourself? I was talking generally.”