“Come into my room,” he added. “I want to read you my last chapter. It is on the value of habits. You can sew if you like.”
“Archie! You never saw me sew in your life. It is Margaret’s resource, not mine. I never could comprehend its interest for women. M. A. was a bit of a prig in my opinion; but, as to the commentary, look out,—previous experience should have warned you,—there will be two commentaries,” and she went in after him, laughing.
As he passed Rose, he said, “By the way, and to put your conscience at ease before you fish again, here is a note-book of mine in which you may see that while hunting is forbidden to the clergy, fishing is allowed. The reasons are amusing. Ned or Dick will help you, but the Latin is easy.”
“Walton quotes it,” added Lyndsay.
“No, only in part,” said Anne.
“You are intolerable. Your literary conscience is like Margaret’s moral exactness. There is no living with either of you.”
“Don’t believe him, Rose; but keep for me the quotation.”
She devoured books, and digested them also, with the aid of a rather too habitual acidity of criticism; but what was in them she never forgot.
“Come, now, Archie.”
Rose took the note-book and sat down. This was what she read, from the Decretals of Lyons, 1671: “Sed quare prohibetur venari, et non piscari? Quia forte piscatio sine clamore, venatio non; vel quia major est delectatio in venatione; dum enim quis et in venatione nihil potest de divinis cogitare.”[[1]]