"She thinks you are too pretty and lively, and—and—" (frivolous had been the word employed by Mrs. Brandon, but Robert cannot find it in his heart to apply it to his idol)—"too fond of society to care about being useful in tame, humdrum, everyday ways."
Esther gives her head a little impatient shake.
"Mrs. Brandon adheres to the golden axiom, so evidently composed by some one to whom beauty was sour grapes, that it is better to be good than pretty; an axiom that assumes that the one is incompatible with the other."
So speaking she relapses into a chafed silence, and he into his vigilant dumb observation of her. At the end of a quarter of an hour, as he still shows no signs of moving, finding the present position of affairs no longer tolerable, Miss Craven jumps up, flings down her heap of huckaback on the floor, and says abruptly, with a sort of forced resignation:
"I will come to the wood, if you wish; it will be all the same a hundred years hence."
"I am perfectly happy as I am," he answers with provoking good humour, looking up in blissful unconsciousness at her charming cross face, and the plain yet dainty fit of her trim cheap gown.
"But I am not," she rejoins brusquely; "indoors it is stifling to-day; please introduce me as quickly as possible to that breeze you spoke of; I have not been able to find a trace of one all day."
She fetches her hat and puts it on; too indifferent as to her appearance in his eyes to take the trouble of casting even a passing glance at herself in the glass, to see whether it is put on straight or crooked.
The Glan-yr-Afon wood is a fickle, changeable place; like a vain woman, it is always taking off one garment and putting on another. Three months ago, when the April woods were piping to it, it had on a mist-blue cloak of hyacinths—what could be prettier?—but now it has laid it aside, and is all tricked out in gay grass, green, flecked here and there with rosy families of catch-fly and groups of purple orchis spires. Do you remember those words of the sweetest, wildest, fancifullest of all our singers?
"And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss,
That led through this garden along and across,—
Some open at once to the sun and the breeze,
Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees,—
"Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells
As fair as the fabulous asphodels,
And flow'rets that, drooping as day drooped too,
Fell into pavilions white, purple, and blue,
To roof the glowworm from the evening dew."