The aesthetic opera was fresh then, and Hilda could not have enough of it; and she laughed, she laughed!
Thomas Meres often sat thinking gloomily of this his favourite child. It was well that she was so clever, for she would have to teach, or so he supposed. What else was there for a girl to do? He could not send her into a postoffice, or make her a dispenser of drugs. Poor Hilda!
But I was saying that it was she who first ventured to speak to Ada of the latter’s marriage. It was on a walk they took together, over the bridge and along the Park edge of the river, one windy evening at the end of February. It was dusking, and they had the Embankment to themselves, so ran a race from Chelsea Bridge to Battersea Park Pier, to reach it before a steamer coming from the City; having won the race, they stood to-see the boat move on towards the pier at Chelsea. The lights along the opposite bank were just being lit, and made a pretty effect.
“Ada,” said the younger girl, as they walked on.
“Yes.”
“When are you going to be married?”
A gust of wind excused silence for a moment; they both had to bend forward against it.
“Perhaps never,” was the reply at length. Ada would not have spoken thus at another time and place; just now she was enjoying the sense of full life, quickened in her veins by the run in keen air.
“Never? But I thought it was going to be very soon?—Am I rude?”
“Not at all; there’s no secret conspiracy. It was to have been soon, but that’s altered.”