“What are you going to be when you grow up?”
“What am I going to be? A soldier, of course.”
“I thought so; then you can murder on a large scale.”
“You call killing the enemy in battle, murder?”
“What do you call it? Fair sport?”
“I say, Miss Warren, you’re a rum’un, you are!” observed Edgar, shaking his round head in wonder. “Are you joking?—though you don’t look like it.”
Ada held the catapult out to him.
“Here, take it and run off,” she said, shortly.
He obeyed, and brought down a blackbird not fifty yards away, then ran to Mrs. Clarendon and his mother, who laughed at the story. The ladies’ ideas of sport did not greatly differ; were not the fowls of the air, the fishes of the deep and the foxes of the field created for the British sportsman? Surely no piece of teleology was clearer.
Ada had no one whom she could take into her confidence, no soul to which she could speak out the sincerity of her own. With Rhoda Meres she exchanged letters at long intervals, but the thoughts they expressed to each other were only from the surface of their lives; the girls were friends only in the slightest sense of the word. It was true that she had in her possession just now a letter from another correspondent, awaiting an answer; that reply she could not bring herself to write; and, when she did so, the words would not be those it was in her to say. Her isolation was absolute. Whatsoever force of waters beat against the flood-gates of her heart, she could not give them free passage.