“Oh, yes, I can quite believe that the Guv’nor strokes your fur a bit,” said Archie, whose insight into the human heart was pitiless, “when he has you in on Saturday evenings and wants to persuade you to fish him a few quotations out of Bohn. We know where all the embroidery comes from, don’t we, Toddles?”
“It’s not Bohn, anyhow,” said Miss Grace, “’cause the binding’s better. Hullo, what’s up with Toddles! Why, he’s choking!”
It required the undivided energies of two strong men to beat the little curate on the back ere he was restored to a sense of his responsibilities.
“I think,” said the old gentleman, with sly enjoyment, “that these revelations are hardly suited to the young miss. Feminine ideals, you know.”
At this Miss Grace looked keenly about her on every side. “It’s all serene, Father,” said she. “There’s none o’ the maids about. Don’t think they can possibly hear us.”
“Laura,” said the old gentleman, hiding the most significant part of his face in a tea-cup, “I want you to confine yourself in your spare time to learning to play with a perfectly straight bat. The way in which you pull everything blindly to leg is a reproach, a disgrace to the family. You boys ought to be really ashamed of it, and it grieves me to think that Laura’s self-respect allows her to do it. I’m wondering if we had Arthur Shrewsbury down for a bit whether he’d be able to do anything for her.”
“It’s her sex asserting itself,” said Archie. (It should be said at once that Archie has such an amount of psychology and kindred things in his mind that he has written a novel for the Keynotes Series.) “The eternal feminine is not to be repressed. There’s two things about Grace’s cricket that betrays the woman. One, as the Guv’nor has remarked, is her deplorable habit of playing everything with a cross bat; the other is a well-defined tendency to dispute the umpire’s decisions. Woman-like, she declines to recognise a mere man’s authority. If it were not for the fear that she’d have been defying Bob Thoms or some other potentate, and refusing to go out when he gave her ‘petticoat before,’ we might have played her for Middlesex, for her bowling and fielding all through the season.”
“It’s all jolly fine you men ragging me about my cross bat,” said poor Miss Grace, whose face had the tawny red of a tea-rose. “But if I was Ranjy, or Clem Hill, or Archie Trentham, or one of those big pots, people ’ud say it was a marvellous hook stroke, and the fruit of my wonderful original method.”
“Yes,” said her enemy of Harrow, “if you were Ranjy, or Clem Hill, or Archie Trentham, or one of those big pots, your picture’d be in the Jubilee Cricket Book, with you in the act of droppin’ ’em into the cucumber frame. But as you don’t happen to be Ranjy, or Clem Hill, or Archie Trentham, or one of those big pots, but Miss Laura Mary, the cheekiest girl that ever put her hair in pins, your cross bat is beastly disgusting, and cruel rough on your people. And if your father don’t send for Shrewsbury to lick you into shape, we will, because you’ve got to be broke in, that’s certin. Whenever I think about your battin’, Laura,—it’s an insult to the Old Man to call you Grace,—it makes me downright sick.”
“Gentlemen,” said the little parson, rising at this point in the peroration and speaking in his most clergymanly intonation, “must we not do our painful duty?”