“I suppose they are,” Ivy Gilbert conceded, “dear little things, and they certainly are my cousins—but a long way off. It isn’t the children I object to—it’s having to teach them. I like Blanche fairly well, and I’m fond of Dick—sometimes—and I daresay I’d be quite fond of them, if I didn’t see them often, and never had to.”
“You don’t like teaching?” Mary said, incredulously. “Oh, I’d love to, more than anything else, if only I knew enough! And you don’t like to teach? Truly?”
“I loathe it. You don’t know whether you’d like it or not—until you’ve tried it. You’d know then. But you don’t have to ‘know enough’ or to know much of anything. Education’s a very minor asset—at least for a nursery governess, and I suspect for any other sort of teacher. There’s only one thing you need: patience, patience, patience—and then patience! Eternal patience! Cow-like, door-mat patience. Oh, I loathe the whole show! Emma’s kind enough. Charley’s a dear. But I loathe it all. I feel stuck in a ditch! And I want to move and to be. I want to taste life, and make some of it. But there, let’s talk about something else!” The young, passionate voice broke off impatiently, and the girl clutched a great fern from its root and began fanning herself with it slowly. And the scarlet peppers she wore dangling at her breast, a splendid splash of Oriental color on the exquisite jade of her linen gown, shook passionately as she moved.
The other girls wore flowers—tea-roses and violets—as girls should. But Ivy had robbed Miss Julia’s kitchen-garden of a handful of red, red peppers, and fastened them in her gown. And odd as the garniture was, no one had commented on it. Ivy Gilbert always was doing something “queer,” and no one had exclaimed at her wearing of “vegetables.” And certainly the scarlet peppers suited her. Her passionate, brunette face, with its soft, mutinous, gold-brown eyes, its vivid, curved lips, its crown of dark, curling hair, and its accentuation of darker eyebrows and up-curling long lashes, looked more Spanish than English, as she sat there in the bright green “twilight,” in her jade-green gown, and the brilliant red peppers jolting each other at her breast.
Lucille hastened to change the subject.
“Why didn’t you come to Mrs. Trull’s breakfast?” she asked.
Ivy shrugged again.
“You don’t like Maggie Trull, do you?” Molly asked. “I do, so much; why ever don’t you?”
“She kisses me!” Ivy said angrily, just as two men came through the gleaming trees. “I hate to be kissed! It’s a loathsome, indecent thing. I never can forgive any one who kisses me!”
The men had heard. The white-haired elder smiled a little under his white mustache. But his younger companion gravely regarded the girl who had spoken, and approval lit in his black, inscrutable eyes.