“The quadruped was wiser than the biped,” remarked Bessie, “and declined experiments. For the future, I intend to learn wisdom from a cow.”
“I wish you could learn wisdom from anything,” observed Mrs. Ormson.
“My beloved mother, that, I fear, is impossible, since I have failed to acquire it from you,” said Bessie.
“You remember those letters you forwarded to me, Arthur,” broke in Heather at this point; “one was from Miss Hope, to say she had returned from Munich, and would like to come to us; and the other from Mrs. Black, who had not heard I was in London, and wanted to know whether it would be convenient for her and Mr. Black to pay us a visit now, instead of later on in the year. Mr. Black has been ill, and it is his most leisure time at present; so I called in Stanley Crescent and arranged that they should bring Harry Marsden down with them next week. It really is pitiable to see poor Mrs. Marsden with all those young children about her, ill as she is.”
“Was there no one else, Heather, you could have asked while you were about it?” he inquired. “We have a tolerably large barn, and plenty of hay and straw, so that a score or two more would make little difference.”
Heather bit her lip, but otherwise took no notice of her husband’s remark. Heaven knew she had not gone out of her way to ask any of these people, who were neither kith nor kin of hers, and whom, truth to say, it would scarcely have grieved her had she never beheld in the flesh again.
If the house were full of visitors during the summer season, as it usually was, those visitors were none of her seeking, although on her fell the burden of amusing and catering for them.
With one and another Arthur walked through the fields, or down the lane, or across the meadows, towards the Hollow. To Mrs. Ormson he would discourse concerning his grievances; he would quarrel with Mrs. Black about the relative merits of town and country; while from Mr. Black he culled such information anent the “way in which a man with push and a few hundreds might get on in London,” that for months subsequently Squire Dudley thought of nothing excepting how he might best contrive to emigrate to this wonderful El Dorado, to those metropolitan gold-fields, where nuggets were discovered, not in pits and creeks, but in dingy city offices, or in great board-rooms, all shining with polished mahogany and bright morocco leather.
As for Miss Hope, she was to Heather, saving by correspondence, an utter stranger. Never in her life had the present mistress of Berrie Down Hollow set eyes on the sister of the lady who had once reigned there supreme. For more than seven years Miss Hope had wandered to and fro on the earth. She had wintered here; she had summered there. She had been returning every season to London; and every season she heard of some fresh plan, or met with some fresh person, that induced her to defer her intention of coming back to England.
Bohemianism is not confined to one sex or class in the community, and there are numbers of forlorn spinsters and lonely widows, running loose about the Continent, frequenting British watering-places and foreign spas, picking up acquaintances in railway carriages and at table d’hôtes, who would be greatly disgusted if they were assured that the lives of the men they call Bohemians in London are infinitely more useful, and quite as respectable, as theirs;—wandering women, who have no care for the Lares and Penates of the ordinary English home, whose talk is of art and of far-away cathedrals, of foreign cookery and Rhine wines, who have got up to see the sun rise in every country except their own, who go in for passports instead of Sunday-schools, who sit next “our own correspondent” at dinner-parties on their return to London, and converse with him concerning Rome and Vienna, when they mutually agree that the Continent is the place to live, that the man, woman, or child, who is content to reside in England, should be sent to the Asylum for Idiots at once.