Mr. Wycherly was very exhausted after this long conversation. He lay back in his chair and closed his eyes with a sense of well-earned repose. Whatever this child—this window-breaking, "cropping-up," generally disturbing little girl might be, she could not be one half so dreadful as the sort of servant Mr. Wycherly saw himself a thrall to if Mrs. Dew deserted him. Besides, Mrs. Dew, herself, would be there to keep her in order.
"These domestic cares are very disorganising," he reflected. He felt a positive distaste for the Migrarian School of Philosophy just then. The pamphlet on Eubulides lay open at his elbow, but he ignored it. Instead, he went over to his book-case and took from it "Tristram Shandy," which he dearly loved. He opened it at random, standing where he was, and his eyes fell on this passage:
"'I can't get out—I can't get out,' said the starling.
"I stood looking at the bird; and to every person who came through the passage, it ran fluttering to the side towards which they approached it, with the same lamentation of its captivity. 'I can't get out,' said the starling. 'God help thee!' said I, 'but I'll let thee out, cost what it will.'"
"I wonder now," Mr. Wycherly thought to himself, "if that poor little half-Greek girl feels like Sterne's starling."
CHAPTER VII
JANE-ANNE SWEARS FEALTY
"Minds lead each other in contrary directions, traverse each other in numberless points, and at last greet each other at the journey's end. An old man and a child would talk together; and the old man be led on his path and the child left thinking." JOHN KEATS.
Jane-Anne had managed to get an exceedingly bad cold. To run on wet grass in stockings, if one wears the stockings all the evening afterwards, is not a wise proceeding for a delicate person. And when, the next day, she went to keep her tryst with Edmund, she knew very well that her lung was at its old tricks again; and that, had she been "at the Bainbridge," matron would have sent for the doctor. He would have listened at her back with his funny indiarubber tube, and would then have muttered something mysterious about "crepitation."
Jane-Anne had her own idea of "crepitation," which she abbreviated to "the creppits." She always pictured this unfortunate lung as a bent and aged person sidling along "with legs that went tap-lapperty like men that fear to fall."