“Do you write poetry?” asked the old lady of William.
“You need not ask him, he could not read as he did, if he did not write,” said Miss Clara turning round in an eager glow, which momentary enthusiasm some other feeling overpowered, and she turned away again a little bashfully.
“You do write, I see it confessed in your eyes,” exclaimed Mrs. Kincton Knox. “He does, Clara, you’re right. I really think sometimes she’s a—a—fairy.”
“Ask him, mamma, to read us some of his verses,” pleaded Clara, just a little timidly.
“You really must, Mr. Herbert—no, no, I’ll hear of no excuses; our sex has its privileges, you know, and where we say must, opposition vanishes.”
“Really,” urged William, “any little attempts of mine are so unworthy⸺”
“We must and will have them to-morrow evening; dear me, how the hours do fly. You have no idea, Clara dear, how late it is, quite dreadful. I’m really angry with you, Mr. Herbert, for beguiling us into such late hours.”
So the party broke up, and when Mrs. Kincton Knox entered her daughter’s room where she was in a dishevelled stage of preparation for bed, she said, her maid being just despatched on a message—
“I really wish, mamma, you’d stop about that Lord of Burleigh; I saw him look quite oddly when you asked for it again to-night, and he must know, unless he’s a fool, that you don’t care two pence about poetry, and you’ll just make him think we know who he is.”
“Pooh! nonsense, Clara! don’t be ridiculous,” said her mother, a little awkwardly, for she had a secret sense of Clara’s superiority. “I don’t want you to teach me what I’m to do, I hope, and who brought him here, pray, and investigated, and, in fact—here’s Brookes back again—and you know we are to have his own verses to-morrow night, so we don’t want that, nor any more, if you’d rather not, and you can’t possibly be more sick of it than I am.”