“Next time you catch a pike just look at it and see if I’m not right,” continued Tom easily. “But perhaps you don’t fish. I’m a great angler myself. That’s the way I spend most of my time during the holidays.”
“I don’t like fishing, its so wormy,” said Irene, with a shudder. “I like lolling about and feeling that there’s nothing to do, and no wretched bells jangling every half-hour to send you off to a fresh class. ‘Nerve rest,’ that’s what I need in my holidays, and I take good care that I get it.”
“I don’t want rest. I want to fly round the whole day and do nice things,” said a bright-eyed girl in a wonderful plaid dress ornamented with countless buttons—“lunches, and teas, and dinners, and picnics, and dances, and plays. I like to live in a whirl, and stay in bed to breakfast, and be waited on hand and foot. I don’t say I get it, but it’s what I would have if I could.”
“Well, I’m a nice, good little maid who likes to help her mother and be useful. When I go back I say to her, ‘Now don’t worry any more, dear; leave all to me,’ and I run the house and make them all c–ringe before me. Even the cook is afraid of me. She says I have such ‘masterful ways.’”
The speaker was a tall, fair girl, with a very large pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of an aquiline nose. She looked “masterful” enough to frighten a dozen cooks, and made a striking contrast to the next speaker, a mouse-like, pinched little creature, with an air of conscious, though unwilling, virtue.
“I spent the last half of these holidays with a clergyman uncle, and helped in the parish. I played the harmonium for the choir practice, and kept the books for the Guilds and Societies. His daughter was ill, and there was no one else to take her place, so, of course, I went at once. It is quite a tiny little country place—Condleton, in Loamshire.”
“What!” cried Rhoda, and sat erect in her seat sparkling with animation. “Condleton! I know it quite well. I often drive over there with my ponies. It is only six miles from our place, and such a pretty drive. I know the Vicarage quite well, and the Church, and the funny little cross in the High Street!”
She spoke perfectly simply, and without thought of ostentation, for her parents’ riches had come when she herself was so young that she had no remembrance of the little house in the manufacturing town, but looked as a matter of course upon the luxuries with which she was surrounded. It never occurred to her mind that any of her remarks could be looked upon as boasting, but there was a universal glancing and smiling round the room, and Thomasina enquired gravely:
“Do you drive the same pair every day?”
“Of ponies? Oh, yes, generally,” replied Rhoda innocently. “They are frisky little things, and need exercise. Of course if we go a very long way, I give them a rest next day and drive the cobs, but as a rule they go out regularly.”