“She is very agreeable, even off the stage,” said Maury, “and there’s nothing against her coming among us.”
“They have been playing lawn tennis, and all that nonsense,” went on the girl. “I hate it and I wish they would not bother me to play!”
“Don’t you think you are a little cross, Selina?” her brother asked.
Just then some young men came up and he was glad to get away. It was an hour or so before he found Gwendoline.
At last he espied her, seated beneath a bower of roses and swinging lanterns, the sun trying to peep at her through the leaves. Two or three young men, in tennis costumes, were collected around her, and one lay on the grass at her feet, playing with his bat. She, too, wore a tennis costume, for she belonged to a club and played. It was the one thing she would do that her mother disapproved of.
She must, at times, shake off those everlasting silks and laces, along with her apparent indolence, and race on foot with bat and ball.
Her suit was a close-fitting skirt and a jacket, trimmed with red, with cap to match. “Much like the jockey’s,” she thought, as she donned it, that morning, before the glass. She made a lovely picture, against a background of green, as she reclined in a garden seat and sipped an ice. The brilliant trimming of her dress enhanced the glory of her hair and contrasted with the whiteness of her skin.
“Oh! Miss Gwendoline, I’ve been hunting you everywhere! You know my horses? I’ve just been told that they might have once belonged to your father; and you, perhaps, can tell me their names,” and Maury took a seat beside her.
“Yes! they did belong to my father, and their names are Castor and Pollux.”
“Oh, indeed! and to think I never knew it before! What lovely names!—and my boy has been calling them Dandy and Jack all this time. Why didn’t you correct me, when I called them by those names?” he asked, eagerly.