"Yes, do, or father will pick it up, and then he'll elocute it at us all the evening; I'd rather read it myself than that. Who's in the drawing-room?"
"Nobody. It's Thursday, you know—father's afternoon at Great Hunby. I was going to send in a steak for his supper, but Rose always burns them so; the last we had came up a cinder. I really don't know what to get."
"As the dinner was raw, she's quite sure to burn the supper. Why don't you make him an omelette?"
"He likes something substantial when he comes back," said Bee thoughtfully. "Perhaps eggs and bacon——"
"Eggs and bacon are so soon over," objected Hilda; "and, besides, if they aren't broiling hot——I know! Get him a Perrin's pork-pie."
Bee brightened. Its pride in its pork-pies is a cult in Beckenhampton—they obsess the local mind—but there are pies and pies, and Perrin's are the pinnacle. If the King were to consent to sup in a Beckenhampton ménage, the breathless question, "What shall we give him?" would be disposed of when someone exclaimed, "Give him a Perrin's pork-pie."
"That's it," she said. "I'll tell Rose to run out now. I don't know what I was about not to think of it—I might have brought one in with me."
She went downstairs again promptly, and, when she returned, the book that she had bought was in her hands. This had not, as had Rossetti and Tennyson and the others in the "line," the cachet of Mr. Tuffington's "special recommendation"; it was a mere work that he did not stock. She gave it to her sister, and lit the gas.
"There you are," she smiled; "it will be something to go on with, though it is poetry."
"Anything is livelier than the advertisement sheets of the newspaper," said Hilda, unwrapping it, "if you're sure you don't want it yourself. I'm so dull I could read Shakespeare. What a hideous cover! 'A Celibate's Love Songs—by David Lee.' Why did you order it; is he anybody? He only seems to have written one thing before."