“But we authors are so afraid of sentiment nowadays!——”
“Bombay, I think—or else Hyderabad——”
“Oh, he talks like a fool!——”
“Raff! Come here and recite ‘The King is Duller’——”
“But Love is Law!——”
“Suspend our judgments until we’ve heard the other side——”
“Only water—but they couldn’t break her spirit—she was out again in three days——”
And again there came an unexpected lull.
This time it was broken by, perhaps not the loudest, but certainly the most travelling voice yet—the voice of the caryatid beneath the bracket with the bust upon it. Miss Belchamber was dressed in a sleeveless surcoat chess-boarded with large black and white squares; the skirt beneath it was of dark blue linen; and there were beards of leather on her large brown brogues. One of the young Oxford men, greatly daring, had approached her and asked her a question. She turned slowly; she gave the young man the equal-soul-to-equal-soul look; and then the apparatus of perfect voice-production was set in motion. Easily and powerfully the air came from her magnificent chest, up the splendid six-inch main of her throat, rang upon the hard anterior portion of her palate, and was cut, as it were, to its proper length and shaped into perfect enunciation by her red tongue and beautiful white teeth.