“That vain, wicked, foolish, and depraved Goose!” said Jim’s mother. “You met her in Hyde Park this morning walking with her duke, and she gave you a smile, and if she was more than usually foolish, she said, ‘Why, it’s Jim!’”
“She was à cheval. But you are wonderful, you know,” said Jim.
“Riding was she? And pray how did the great overgrown creature look outside a horse?”
“I could never have believed it. She was mounted on a glorious chestnut, a great mountain of a beast, a noble stepper; and in her smart new habit, and in an extraordinarily coquettish bowler—think on it, my dear, the Goose Girl in a bowler!—she was a picture for the gods.”
“One can readily believe that the creature would set high Olympus in a roar.”
“She was to the manner born. She might have learned the art of equitation in la haute école instead of in the home paddock at Widdiford on that screw of the dear old governor’s.”
“Oh no, dear boy,” said Jim’s mother, with decision. “Poor dear Melancthon was anything but a screw. He was by Martin Luther out of Moll Cutpurse. He won the point-to-point on three occasions.”
“I humbly beg Melancthon’s pardon. That explains why the Goose Girl comes to be so proficient. She certainly looked this morning as if she had never sat anything less than the blood of Carbine.”
“I think the secret of the whole matter, my son,” said Jim’s mother, profoundly, “is that the Female Us is so marvelously adaptable. If she is really smartly turned out on a fine morning in June with a real live duke on the off side of her and all London gazing at her, if she had never learned to sit anything else than a donkey she would still contrive to look as though she had won the whole gymkhana. It is just that quality that makes the Female Us so wonderful. It is just that that maketh Puss so soon get too big for her dancing slippers.”
“Well, you wise woman,” said Jim, “the Goose Girl would have taken all the prizes this morning. And she didn’t even cut me.”