“Shouldn’t care a bit, you know, if she wasn’t here. I was never properly coached at school, you know. I will draw away from leg balls, you know. If Charlie bowls any, you know, sure as death, I shall retire towards the umpire. Do you think she’ll be able to tell that from here?”
“They say Abel does the same,” said I evasively.
“And I’ve got no wrist, you know. Can’t cut a bit, you know. Have to sort o’ shove ’em, you know, with my arms and shoulders.”
“Quite a coincidence,” said I, “for they always say that the Old Man does all his cutting with his arms and shoulders.”
“And I’m always scraping forward and feeling for ’em. Get so beastly flurried if I wait, that I’m certain to be bowled.”
“Well,” said I, “it’s the sort of wicket on which you can play forward to anything. Hard as concrete.”
“But she’s fair death on style,” said the poor old Optimist. “She’s got such a terrible high standard, don’t you know? Asked her this morning what she thought of A. H.’s batting. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘Archie’s a pretty fair rustic bat.’”
“She may take a much higher view of yours,” said I. “Women are that funny, you don’t know when you’ve got ’em. Shouldn’t be a bit surprised if she don’t fall in with your style on the spot, for really I’ve seen worse.”
“Not much,” groaned the poor old Optimist.
Here the voice of this unflinching critic, who really had been born half a century too late, such an ornament she would have been to Blackwood and the Quarterly in their palmy days, put an end to our painful conversation. As the field were returning with the ball, she bent over the wheels to tell her brother Charlie, in a not inaudible undertone: