“Mm.”
“And if I might make so bold as to add a ’arf bottle of good Guinness, m’lady. It’s a tonic. Run down as you are.”
Without oysters neither Lady Charlotte nor Unwin would have considered stout a proper drink for a lady. And indeed it was not a proper drink for Lady Charlotte. A very little stout sufficed to derange her naturally delicate internal chemistry. Upon the internal chemistry of Lady Charlotte her equanimity ultimately depended. There is wrath in stout....
Then Mr. Grimes, who had never ceased to hope that considerable out-of-court activities might still be developed around these two little wards, had taken great pains to bring Aunt Phœbe’s Collected Papers of a Stitchwoman (Second Series) and her little precious volume Carmen Naturæ before his client’s notice.
These books certainly made startling reading for Lady Charlotte. She had never seen the first “Stitchwoman” papers, she knew nothing of Swinburne, Ruskin, Carlyle, the decadents, nothing of the rich inspirations of the later Victorian period, and so the almost luscious richness of Aunt Phœbe’s imagination, her florid verbiage, her note of sensuous defiance, burst almost devastatingly upon a mind that was habituated to the ordered passions and pearly greys of Mrs. Henry Wood’s novels More Leaves, Good Words, and The Quiver.
“’With what measure ye mete,’” she read, “’so shall it be meted unto you again,’ and the Standard that Man has fixed for woman recoils now upon his head. Which standard is it to be,—His or Hers? No longer can we fight under two flags. Wild oats, or the Immaculate Banner? Question to be answered shrewdly, and according to whether we deem it is Experience or Escape we live for, now that we are out of Eden footing it among the sturdy, exhilarating thistles. What will ye, my masters?—pallid man unstained, or seasoned woman? Judgment hesitates. Judgment may indeed hesitate. I, who sit here stitching, mark her hesitation, myself—observant. Is it too bold a speculation that presently golden lassies as well as golden lads will sow their wild oats bravely on the slopes of life? Is it too much to dream of that grave mother of a greater world, the Woman of the Future, glancing back from the glowing harvest of her life to some tall premonition by the wayside?—her One Wild Oat! the crown and seal of her education!”
“Either she means nothing by that,” said Lady Charlotte, “or she means just sheer depravity. Wild Oat, indeed! Really! To call it that! With Joan on her hands already!”
And here again is a little poem from Carmen Naturæ, which also impressed Lady Charlotte very unfavourably:
THE MATERIALIST SINGS
Put by your tangled Trinities