Not that he controlled the picnic. It was spread out in front of her, bewitching, intimate, in its suggestion of you—and—I; two shiny plates, two knives, two forks, two fringed and glossy napkins. A dark red bottle was propped upright between two stones, a pile of thin, triangular sandwiches balanced daintily on some cool lettuce leaves, and a fascinating object that glistened mysteriously in the sun, held the platter of honor in the middle.
"The Honorable Mr. Puck," suggested the young man, in the tone of one continuing an interrupted conversation, "is figuring out how the chicken got into the jelly without busting it—am I not right?"
Brother grinned, and Caroline moved a little nearer. Miss Honey stared at the young lady's fluted skirts and glistening yellow waves of hair, at the sweeping plume in her hat, and her tiny high-heeled buckled slippers.
"I am obliged to admit," the young man went on, slicing into the quivering aspic, "that I don't know myself. I never could find out. Perhaps the young person in the—the not-too-long skirts, waved her wand over the bird and he jumped in and the hole closed up?" He slipped a section of the bird in question upon the lady's plate and held the red bottle over her cup.
"There was hard-boiled eggs stuck on those jelly things at our wedding," Brother remarked, "on the outside, all around. But they were bigger than yours."
"I don't doubt it for a moment," the young man assured him politely. "Have you been married long, may I ask? And which of these ladies—"
"Brother doesn't mean that he was married," Miss Honey explained, "it was his oldest sister. She married a lawyer. I was flower girl."
"Ima fow guh," murmured the General, thrusting out a fat and unexpected hand and snatching from a hitherto unperceived box a tiny cake encased in green frosting.
"Oh, dear, it's got the pistache!" said the yellow-haired lady disgustedly.
Miss Honey fled after the General, who, though he was obliged to wear whalebone braces in his shoes on account of youth and a waddling and undeveloped gait, scattered over the ground with the elusive clumsiness of a young duckling. Brother blushed, but scorned to desert his troop.