“Oh, but who are the ‘we,’ papa? If everybody knows it—even grandmamma, for instance—what pleasure can I hope to find in ever having been predicted?”
“You may enjoy that pleasure, Alice, as exclusively as you please. Even your grandmother knows nothing of the matter we have now in hand; or else—at least I should say perhaps that, if it were otherwise——”
“She would have been down here, of course, papa, and have marched up to the room herself; but, if the whole thing belongs to one’s self, nothing can be more delightful than to have been predicted, especially in glowing terms, such as I beg you now, papa, to read in glowing tones to me.”
“Alice, I do not like that style of—what shall I call it?—on your part. Persiflage, I believe, is the word; and I am glad that there is no English one. It is never graceful in any woman, still less in a young girl like you. Hilary brought it from Oxford first: and perhaps he thought it excellent. Lay it aside now, once and for all. It hopes to seem a clever thing, and it does not even succeed in that.”
At these severe words, spoken with a decided attempt at severity, Alice fell back, and could only drop her eyes, and wonder what could have made her father so cross upon his birthday. But, after the smart of the moment, she began to acknowledge to herself that her father was right, and she was wrong. This flippant style was foreign to her, and its charms must be foregone.
“I beg your pardon, father dear,” she said, looking softly up at him; “I know that I am not clever, and I never meant to seem so.”
“Quite right, Alice; never attempt to do anything impossible.” Saying this to her, Sir Roland said to himself that, after all, he should like to know very much where to find any girl half so clever as Lallie, or any girl even a quarter so good, and so loving, and so beautiful.
“The sun is almost gone behind the curve of the hill, and the scrubby beech, and the nick cut in the gorsebush. Alice, you know we only see it for just the Midsummer week like that.”
Alice came, with her eyes already quit of every trace of tears; with vanity and all petty feelings melting into larger thought. The beauty of the world would often come around and overcome her, so that she felt nothing else.
“The sun must always be the same,” Sir Roland said, rather doubtfully, after waiting for Alice to begin. “No doubt he must always be the same; but still the great Herschel seems to think that even the sun is changing. If he is fed by comets (as our old astronomers used to say), he ought to be doing very well just now. Alice, the sun is above ground still, for people on the hill-top, and there is the comet already kindling!”