"I wish mother had named me 'Patience,' for I love a joke!" I wrote frantically—with the same feeling of suffocation which caused Lady Frances Webb to rush out to the rose garden where the sun-dial stood, to keep from hearing the clock tick.
"To me, the inertia which a woman is supposed to exhibit is the hardest part of her whole earthly task! And I don't know what it's for, either, unless to prepare her for a future incarnation into a camel!
"Yet, if you're a woman, you just must stay still and let your heart's desire slip through your fingers—even if you have to lock yourself up into your bedroom closet to accomplish it!"
And yet, even as I wrote, I wondered what I'd do when I should be back in America. Somehow, I didn't exactly fancy myself getting a ticket home from New York with stop-over privileges at Pittsburgh—where I could spend an exciting time looking up a city directory!
And so the remaining days of the voyage passed. The Montgomery family planned to have me go home with them, after a day in London, and declared that I could find as much interesting news to write home for the Herald from Lancashire as from any other portion of the United Kingdom, since one never knew where a fire would be started or a bomb discovered through the playful antics of the women who have changed the "clinging" sex into the flinging sex; and I had accepted fervently—when, on the trip from Liverpool down to London, these arrangements were abruptly upset.
We were a little late in landing, and rushed straight to the train, where a tea-basket, operated in the compartment which we had to ourselves, was giving me the assurance that surely, next to a hayloft on a rainy morning, a private compartment in a British train is the coziest spot on the face of the earth, when Mr. Montgomery suddenly dropped the sheet of newspaper he had been eagerly scanning.
"My word!" he said.
His exclamation was so insistent that I immediately felt in my pocket to see if I had his word, and his wife glanced up from the lamp which she was handling lovingly.
"Yes, Herbert?"
"But I say—Lord Erskine is dead!"