“Port, sir, for my wife, if you please. She likes a rather dry wine, sir, but with plenty of bouquet. There is no subject, I may say, in which she has—ha, haw—a more profound capacity.”
“My dear Nowell, why you are perfectly calumnious. Thank you, no champagne. It spoils the taste of—your beautiful water. How dreadfully we were alarmed in Ringwood. We all but drove over a child. What a providential escape! I have scarcely yet recovered it. It has made me feel so nervous. What, Dr. Hutton, port for a lady, at this time of day, and not ordered medically!”
Thereupon, of course Rufus prescribed it, till Georgie, being quite overcome by the colour, as the host himself decanted it, capitulated at last for “strictly half a glass.”
After a little, the ladies withdrew, to see double perfections in the baby, and Mrs. Hutton, who knew quite well what they had been doing, while she was discussing arrowroot, received them at first rather stiffly. But she had no chance with Georgie, who entered beautifully into the interesting room, and exclaimed with great vivacity—
“Oh, dear Mrs. Hutton, as the little boys say, ‘here we are again.’ And so glad to get away, because your husband is so hospitable, and we thought of you all the time. I wanted so much to bring you a glass of that very exquisite—let me see, I think it must have been port, though I never know one wine from another—only I feared it might seem rude, if I had ventured to propose it. Of course Dr. Hutton knew best.”
“Of course he didnʼt,” said Rosa, pettishly; “he never thought about it. Not that I would have taken it; oh dear no! Ladies cannot have too little wine, I think. It seems to make them so masculine.”
“Well, dear, you know best. Very likely you heard us laughing. I assure you we were quite merry. We drank his health ‘three times threeʼ—donʼt they call it about a baby? And I was nearly proposing yours; only a gentleman ought to do that. Oh, it was so interesting, and the wine superb—at least, so said the gentlemen; I do wish they had brought you some, dear.”
“I am very glad they did not. It is so very lowering to a fine sense of the ideal. I heard you laughing, or making some noise; only I was so absorbed in these lovely poems. ‘To my Babe’ is so very beautiful, so expressive, so elevating! I feel every single word of it. And this sonnet about the first cropper! And the stanzas to his little red shoes, terminating with ‘pinch his nose!’ You have had so many husbands, dear; you must know all about it.”
“My darling child, how I feel for you! But, in all probability, he will come up when both decanters are empty; let him find you in a good temper, dear.”
But this (which must have grown into a row, for Georgie had even more spirit than tact, and Rosa was equal to anything), all this evil was averted, and harmony restored by the popping in of nurse, who had not taken her half–crowns yet, but considered them desirable, and saw them now endangered.