“I should expect you to know a great deal more,” Bessie Alden returned.
“Well, women always know more than men about names and dates and historical characters,” he said. “There was Lady Jane Grey we’ve just been hearing about, who went in for Latin and Greek and all the learning of her age.”
“You have no right to be ignorant at all events,” Bessie argued with all her freedom.
“Why haven’t I as good a right as any one else?”
“Because you’ve lived in the midst of all these things.”
“What things do you mean? Axes and blocks and thumbscrews?”
“All these historical things. You belong to an historical family.”
“Bessie really harks back too much to the dead past—she makes too much of it,” Mrs. Westgate opined, catching the sense of this colloquy.
“Yes, you hark back,” the young man laughed, thankful for a formula. “You do make too much of the dead past.”
He went with the ladies a couple of days later to Hampton Court, Willie Woodley being also of the party. The afternoon was charming, the famous horse-chestnuts blossomed to admiration, and Lord Lambeth, who found in Miss Alden the improving governess, he declared, of his later immaturity, as Mademoiselle Boquet, dragging him by the hand to view all lions, had been that of his earliest, pronounced the old red palace not half so beastly as he had supposed. Bessie herself rose to raptures; she went about murmuring and “raving.” “It’s too lovely; it’s too enchanting; it’s too exactly what it ought to be!”