“To transport merchandise, I suppose,” said Aileen. “We should be rather badly off without tea, and silk, and spices, and such things—shouldn’t we?”
“Tea and silk! Aileen. I would be content to wear cotton and drink coffee or cocoa—which latter I hate—if we only got rid of pirates.”
“Even cotton, coffee, and cocoa are imported, I fear,” suggested Aileen.
“Then I’d wear wool and drink water—anything for peace. Oh how I wish,” said Miss Pritty, with as much solemn enthusiasm as if she were the first who had wished it, “that I were the Queen of England—then I’d let the world see something.”
“What would you do, dear?” asked Aileen.
“Do! Well, I’ll tell you. Being the head of the greatest nation of the earth—except, of course, the Americans, who assert their supremacy so constantly that they must be right—being the head, I say, of the greatest earthly nation, with that exception, I would order out all my gun-ships and turret-boats, and build new ones, and send them all round to the eastern seas, attack the pirates in their strongholds, and—and—blow them all out o’ the water, or send the whole concern to the bottom! You needn’t laugh, Aileen. Of course I do not use my own language. I quote from our captain. Really you have no idea what strong, and to me quite new expressions that dear man used. So powerful too, but never naughty. No, never. I often felt as if I ought to have been shocked by them, but on consideration I never was, for it was more the manner than the matter that seemed shocking. He was so gentle and kind, too, with it all. I shall never forget how he gave me his arm the first day I was able to come on deck, after being reduced to a mere shadow by sea-sickness, and how tenderly he led me up and down, preventing me, as he expressed it, from lurching into the lee-scuppers, or going slap through the quarter-rails into the sea.”
After a little more desultory converse, Aileen asked her friend if she were prepared to hear some bad news.
Miss Pritty declared that she was, and evinced the truth of her declaration by looking prematurely horrified.
Aileen, although by no means demonstrative, could not refrain from laying her head on her friend’s shoulder as she said, “Well then, dear Laura, we are beggars! Dear papa has failed in business, and we have not a penny in the world!”
Miss Pritty was not nearly so horrified as she had anticipated being. Poor thing, she was so frequently in the condition of being without a penny that she had become accustomed to it. Her face, however, expressed deep sympathy, and her words corresponded therewith.