But in this supposition Mrs. Ormson chanced to be wrong, as successive visitors from London arrived in due time to testify.
“How delightful to get into the country out of those suffocating streets!” remarked Mrs. Black, a woman of the utterly feeble, limp, languid, and mildly pretty school. “Oh, Arthur, how I envy you this sweet spot!”
In answer to which speech Arthur declared that, if she knew all, perhaps she would find less cause for envy than she imagined. Whereupon Mr. Black, a stout, middle-aged, light-haired, florid, good-looking, self-satisfied individual, observed:
“Yes, that is what I always say, Dudley—my very words, almost. Nobody knows where the shoe pinches but the man who has to walk through life in it. And, after all, though the country is very nice, and Berrie Down a refreshing change from the city in such melting weather, still we all know it is not London. No,” repeated Mr. Black, striking the sod with the heel of his boot, and looking over the landscape as though daring the fields and the trees to contradict him, “it is not London.”
“And a very good thing too it is not,” added Bessie; in answer to which addendum Mr. Black stated his belief that she was just the same as ever, and inquired how, if she disliked town so much, she expected to be able to spend her life in it.
“As I have done hitherto,” she replied, “under protest.”
“Persuade Gilbert when he comes down to turn farmer,” suggested Mrs. Black, sentimentally. “I only wish my lot had been cast among these peaceful scenes.”
The only comment this remark elicited being a muttered sentence from Mr. Black, in which Bessie thought she heard something about “peaceful devils,” the conversation might have been considered ended, but for a voluntary statement from Master Marsden, a young gentleman in knickerbockers, to the effect that he hated London, but that the country was jolly. He had been down in Surrey in the spring, he went on to inform the assembled company in a shrill alto, where he robbed fifty—oh! a hundred—birds’ nests, and wasn’t it prime!
“Then you were wicked boy,” said Miss Lally, with that charming promptitude of judgment which is a peculiarity of her sex.
“Why? don’t you rob nests?” asked the new arrival, in answer to which question Lally shook her comical little head gravely.