“E-e-eben! Don’t be a fool; hand it over.”
Eben, grinning from ear to ear, took a sealed envelope out of his pocket and gave it to her, and having opened it, she began to read its contents with little squirts of laughter.
From time immemorial, young ladies have had a fancy for exercising their calligraphy and taste in copying elegant extracts into an album; for instance, there is a Chinese novel, translated by an abbé of the eighteenth century, which tells of ladies who, all day long, sat in pagodas, copying passages from the classics in hands like the flight of a dragon. Harriet Smith, too, had an album into which she and Emma copied acrostics.
Concha owned to the same harmless weakness; though the extracts copied into her album could perhaps scarcely be qualified as “elegant”: there was, among other things, an unpublished play by W. S. Gilbert—(“What I love about our English humour—Punch, and W. S. Gilbert—is that it never has anything ... well, questionable,” Mrs. Moore would sometimes exclaim to the Doña), Wilke’s Essay on Woman, and Poor but Honest.
One day, Teresa, happening to come into Concha’s room, had caught sight of the album, and asked if she might look at it.
“Oh, do, by all means,” Concha had drawled, partly from defiance, partly from curiosity.
Impassively, Teresa had read it through; and then had said, “I’d advise you to ask Arnold the next time he’s in Cambridge to find you an old copy of Law’s Call to a Devout Life—that man in the market-place might have one—beautifully bound, if possible. Then take out the pages and bind this in the cover.”
Concha had done so; and if she had been as relentless an observer of Teresa as Teresa was of her, she might have detected in what had just transpired a touch on Teresa’s part of under-stated, nevertheless unmistakable, cabotinage.
The contents of the sealed envelope, which was causing her so much amusement, was a copy of the song, Clergymen’s Daughters that on his last leave she had persuaded Eben on his return to his ship to make for her from the gun-room collection, and which he had not on their previous meeting had an opportunity of giving her.
But she was not aware that there are three current versions of this song, corresponding to the X, the double X, and triple X on the labels of whisky bottles, and that it was only the double X strength that Eben had given her.