‘O bosh!’ said Edward, draining the glass with a fine pretence of indifference to consequences, but all the same (as I noticed) dodging the floating cork-fragments with skill and judgment.
‘O, it’s all very well to say bosh,’ replied Harold nettled: ‘but every one knows it’s true but you. Why, when Uncle Thomas was here last, and they got up a bottle of wine for him, he took just one tiny sip out of his glass, and then he said, “Poo, my goodness, that’s corked!” And he wouldn’t touch it. And they had to get a fresh bottle up. The funny part was, though, I looked in his glass afterwards, when it was brought out into the passage, and there wasn’t any cork in it at all! So I drank it all off, and it was very good!’
‘You’d better be careful, young man!’ said his elder brother, regarding him severely: ‘D’you remember that night when the Mummers were here, and they had mulled port, and you went round and emptied all the glasses after they had gone away?’
‘Ow! I did feel funny that night,’ chuckled Harold. ‘Thought the house was comin’ down, it jumped about so: and Martha had to carry me up to bed, ’cos the stairs was goin’ all waggity!’
We gazed searchingly at our graceless junior; but it was clear that he viewed the matter in the light of a phenomenon rather than of a delinquency.
A third bottle was by this time circling; and Selina, who had evidently waited for it to reach her, took a most unfairly long pull, and then, jumping up and shaking out her frock, announced that she was going for a walk. Then she fled like a hare; for it was the custom of our Family to meet with physical coercion any independence of action in individuals.
“‘SHE’S OFF WITH THOSE VICARAGE
GIRLS AGAIN,’ SAID EDWARD”
‘She’s off with those Vicarage girls again,’ said Edward, regarding Selina’s long black legs twinkling down the path. ‘She goes out with them every day now; and as soon as ever they start, all their heads go together and they chatter, chatter, chatter the whole blessèd time! I can’t make out what they find to talk about. They never stop; it’s gabble, gabble, gabble right along, like a nest of young rooks!’
‘P’raps they talk about birds’-eggs,’ I suggested sleepily (the sun was hot, the turf soft, the ginger-beer potent); ‘and about ships, and buffaloes, and desert islands; and why rabbits have white tails; and whether they’d sooner have a schooner or a cutter; and what they’ll be when they’re men—at least, I mean there’s lots of things to talk about, if you want to talk.’