"I—I've hardly thought about it."
"You ought to have thought about it. You have been thirty-five years in a world where there is unlimited happiness and unlimited misery. And you haven't yet decided which you want to choose: Spring days, and stars, and the smell of the sea, and flowers, and experiments in queer forces electrifying every creature that lives and breathes, or somnambulisticism ... listen, I made that word up, I think—in a stuffy old cage, the bars of which are conventions which ought to be broken into smither——"
"Ferlie, you are making that lion angry by beating the umbrella on his bars."
"He can have it if he wants it," she said, hurling it into the cage. "Martha made me bring it because she knows I hate carrying one. Said you always knew a gentlewoman by the make of her umbrella. I should think that anyone having to carry a special sort of umbrella to prove her gentility must be——"
"Good Lord!" exclaimed Cyprian as the lion crunched through silk and spokes, roaring insults at Ferlie the while, "Do come away. The keeper is on his way back here and everybody is looking at us."
Everybody is looking at us! That last truth would have vexed him more but for the tolerant amusement on the face of a lady standing near them. She seemed past middle age and indifferent to the fact, being practically and severely costumed in dark grey, while her iron-grey hair fitted so tidily into her toque that one immediately divined it was shingled. She fixed Cyprian with a placid eye.
"The unfortunate lion," she said, "breaking his teeth, like the rest of us, on an illusion flung like a challenge at his head by Youth in rebellion!"
Cyprian lifted his hat awkwardly in acknowledgment of the remark, inwardly deciding, a little acidly, that she might have realized he was, possibly, as near Ferlie's age as hers. But Ferlie, herself, twisted about with a rapturous greeting.
"Why, it's Aunt Brillianna!"
Aunt Brillianna accompanied them to the tea-shop, picking up the thread of Ferlie's discourse just where the end had blown loose.