“If it’s the thought of that bottle of glycerine and cucumber which is worrying you,” I said, “don’t let it. Send her another. Send her two. Make Tom Kitterick carry them over to Thormanby Park and present them on bended knee, clad only in his shirt and with a halter round his neck.”
The Canon’s gloom merely deepened.
“I don’t think,” I said, “that you need fret about Miss Pettigrew. After all, it’s her job. She must meet plenty of high-spirited girls.”
“I wasn’t thinking of her,” said the Canon.
Then he began to murmur to himself and I was barely able, by leaning over toward him, to catch the quotation.
“Miserarum est neque amori dare ludem. . . .”
He saw that I was listening and lapsed into English. “There’s a translation of that ode,” he said, “into something quite like the original metre”:
“‘How unhappy is the maiden who with Cupid may not play,
And who may not touch the wine cup, but must listen all the day
To an uncle and the scourging of his tongue’”
“Come now, Canon,” I said, “Lalage is a precocious child, I know. But she won’t feel those particular deprivations yet awhile. She didn’t try to flirt with Tom Kitterick, did she?”
“It’s all the same thing really,” said the Canon. “The confinement and discipline will be just as severe on her as they were on that girl of Horace’s, though, of course, they will take a different form. She’s been accustomed to a good deal of freedom and independence.”