“As many quiet days as you like, as long as they are spent with you. Shall we go to Haslemere and take the girls for a picnic—this very day? No, there is Maud’s dinner-party to-night. Fernhurst would be too far. We could not get home to dress, without a rush, if we took a really long day on Bexley Hill.”
“Fernhurst and the sisters will keep till the autumn, especially as you will be having Sophy here to-morrow.”
“Yes, I shall be having Sophy”—with a faint sigh. “We shall have no more cosy little breakfasts like this for a whole week.”
“Nonsense. We can send Sophy’s breakfast up to her room, with strict injunctions not to get up till eleven. People who ain’t used to parties always want a lot of sleep in the morning. Sophy shall be made to sleep. But, for to-day, now? What should you say to a long, lazy day on the river? We can take the train to Moulsey, and row down to Richmond.”
“Too delicious for words. But there is a tea-party in Berkeley Square, and another at Hyde Park Gardens. I promised to go to both.”
“Then you will go to neither. You can send telegrams from Moulsey to say you are seedy, and your doctor ordered a quiet day in the country—I being your doctor for the nonce. We’ll steep ourselves in the mild beauty of Old Father Thames, a poor little river when one remembers Danube and Rhine; but he will serve for our holiday.”
He rang for a time-table, found a train that was to leave Waterloo at eleven, and ordered the victoria to take them to the station.
“Now, Eve, your coolest frock, and your favourite poet to read in your luxurious seat in the stern, while I toil at the oar. Be sure you will not read a page during the whole afternoon! The willows and rushes, the villa gardens dipping to the water’s edge, the people in the passing boats, the patient horses on the tow-path—those will be your books, living, moving, changing things, compared with which Keats and Musset are trash, Endymion colourless, La Carmago a phantom.”
“I’ll take Musset,” said Eve, pouncing upon a vellum-bound duodecimo—a chef d’œuvre of Zaehnsdorf’s, which was one of Vansittart’s latest gifts. “He has opened a new world to me.”
“A very wicked world for your young innocence to explore; a world of midnight rendezvous and early morning assassinations; a world of unholy loves and savage revenges—the dagger, the bowl, the suicide’s despair, the satiated worldling’s vacuity. Yet he is a poet—ain’t he, Eve?—the greatest France ever produced. Compared with that fiery genius Hugo is but a rhetorician.”