"No, only I can sit on a chair any day of my life. I simply insist upon having a packing-case when such a good opportunity offers."
So Meryl and her father were duly ensconced in the only two chairs, and Diana mounted gaily on to a tall, thin packing-case, which would certainly have gone over backwards if Colin, the rather sad-eyed brother, had not caught her just as she was overbalancing.
"How clever of you!..." she laughed. "What happens when you two overbalance and don't happen to be near enough to catch each other?... Does the dinner come in and find you both sprawling on the floor?"
"Well, we've had a good deal of practice, you see," he told her, already cheering visibly. "The tables are turned for us, and we choose a chair when we can get it, for a treat."
Afterwards she made him show her all his clever contrivances for packing-case furniture, and admired his sackcloth curtain, barrel washhand stand, and made him feel vigorous and hopeful.
Stanley was talking to Meryl, and Lionel Macaulay was showing Mr. Pym, the engineer, and Carew over the mine, so she gossiped away to him all by herself. And she drew from him a little of the bitter disappointments they had encountered in the country. A story of first one mine and then another failing them; of capital slipping away and bills mounting; of the gradual cutting down of comforts and increased austerity of living: a story common enough in all colonies where Life puts men through the mill again and again to prove and harden them. Acting perhaps on the lines:
"It is easy enough to be pleasant When life moves along like a song, But the man worth while is the man who can smile When everything goes dead wrong."
Life wants a lot of men and women whom she knows are "worth while" in carrying out her great affairs, and that is perhaps why so often "everything goes dead wrong."
Diana maintained her rôle of gay inconsequence because it pleased her best.
"It all sounds very superior and all that rot, and I'm sure Meryl would call you a hero; but I should swear myself black and blue in your shoes, and that's about what you do pretty often, I expect."