"Now, I wish I hadn't. What beasts we are! We never see a flower but we must pick it, or a bird but we want to shoot it. This might have lived days if I had left it alone, and now it will wither in a few hours. Here."
She stopped and fixed the primrose in Mr. Dashwood's buttonhole. She was so close, touching him, and her felt hat almost brushed his face. There was no one on the path. It was the psychological moment, yet he had to let it go.
"Thanks," he said.
Miss Grimshaw looked at the flower critically for a second, with her pretty head slightly on one side.
"It will stick in without a pin," she said. "Come on, or I'll miss the post. No, thanks, I can carry the letters all right. I like to have something in my hand. Why is it that persons always feel lost without something in their hands? Look, that's Miss Slimon's house, The Ranch. She's immensely rich and awfully mean, and lives there alone with three servants. She's always dismissing them. I don't know why unless they steal the poetry. There's nothing else much to steal, for she's a vegetarian and lives on a shilling a day, and keeps the servants on board wages. And I have to give her a guinea out of my hard-earned savings for that poetical club. I'm going to make Effie write the poetry. It will give the child something to do. That's Colonel Creep's house, The Roost. They were the first people to call on us. Sort of spies sent out by the others to see how the land lay. Do you know, I've never thanked you for something?"
"No? What's that?"
"Do you remember your forethought in making me a niece to Mr. French? Well, I never felt the benefit of your benevolent intention so much as the day when the Creeps called on us, and when they crept into the drawing-room, three girls like white snails, followed by an old gentleman like a white cockatoo. It was so pleasant to think they thought I was on a social and mental equality with them, and so pleasant to think they were wrong!"
"Wrong!" cried Dashwood, flying out. "I should think they were wrong! Not fit to black your boots."
"Perhaps that's what I meant, from my point of view," said Miss Grimshaw modestly, "and perhaps it wasn't. Anyhow, the situation was not without humour. Our relationship with the Crowsnest people has been a long comedy of a sort. You know all our affairs, but you don't know the ins and outs, and how the wild Irish on the hillside——"
"Yes?"