“Oh, what a day! I’ve never been so happy—and never so gloriously disgracefully untidy!”
Then Peter and Stuart looked long upon her, and looked at each other and smiled. For despite her delusions to the contrary, Merle’s vaunted ‘untidiness’ merely succeeded in fitting her to her present frame, as surely as the central figure of a Cornish Riviera poster; a daintily clad mermaid was she, pale-faced and lissom, with eyes reflecting the stormier tints of the sea; delicate ankles; blue-green jersey, closely blown to the figure; hair waving in long strands, albeit not wispily, about her shoulders.
“Merle’s appearance,” remarked Stuart, “is of the very few that can be trusted to look after itself for hours together. Now Peter’s physiognomy needs careful attention every five minutes; it burns and flushes and freckles; and her hair gets really untidy, not merely picturesquely ruffled; and her cap falls to the back of her head, and the buttons are off her skirt, and her neck is mottled mahogany, and oh, her jersey! how sagged and dragged and bagged it was——”
“But then, how it was cheap,” finished Peter.
“When are you two girls going home?” suddenly. “I’m off at to-morrow’s dawn. The call of diamonds. You’d better fix another day; we don’t want to look back on a long journey together, and a sulky, sooty arrival in London, as an ending to all this that we have had. It would be ungrateful.”
“O thou of the Hairpin Vision!” but Peter understood his mood. “When do we want to go, Merle?”
“Saturday is my birthday, and grandmaman is giving me a dinner-party of all the people I hate most. We may as well leave on Friday morning. It’s Wednesday to-day, isn’t it?” vaguely.
“Tuesday. By the way, what have you done about your letters home? Postmarks, I mean.”
“Carn Trewoofa is the nearest postal town to Orson Manor in Devonshire,” replied Merle. And Stuart sat down beside her on the sofa, and discoursed pleasantly on the lake of fire and brimstone, till Mrs. Trenner appeared to introduce them to their lunch, in its raw and natural condition. After which, she retired to cook it. Even Carn Trewoofa is no stranger to certain conditions of etiquette.