"Chestnuts!" said Denis, in solemn tone.
"Oh, you jewel! That's it. Now I'm beautifully right." She scribbled it down.
He picked up a piece of stick, smooth and round. Nell glanced at it and laughed.
"That's Molly's! She's been sitting with a bit of hair rolled round it all the evening!"
It was the ambition of Molly's life to have waving hair like Nell's. Secretly she tried many ways to make it curl. Pencils, pens, bits of stick, all were requisitioned in guilty secrecy.
"Now tell me about your evening, Denis. Who was there?"
"Uncle Pom-Pom and Pennington, of course. Chap named Lancaster, and a queer little man—Yovil, I think his name is—all grey and black bristles. He used to be the elocution master at Pennington's school. He writes, Nell!"
"Oh, what does he write?"
"There was an article of his in last month's Imperial on Coleridge. I'm going to get it. Pennington goes to his place every Tuesday—in the evening; some of the other boys who used to go to his school go too, and they talk and read and recite. No fee, you know; he just does it because he likes it—has an idea that when you've got to leave school to be a beastly clerk or something of that kind, you let your reading slip. Pennington says he's cranky on Billy S.!"
"Don't be so irreverent, Denis!"