“That fools should have the mastery, is it?” inquired the doctor, drily, with a mischievous query in his eye as well. “Tut, tut, tut, doctor,” replied Father Phil, impatiently; “you know well enough what I mean, and I won't allow you to engage me in one of your ingenious battles of words. I speak of that wonderful influence of the weaker sex over the stronger, and how the word of a rosy lip outweighs sometimes the resolves of a furrowed brow; and how the—pooh! pooh! I'm making a fool of myself talking to you—but to make a long story short, I would rather wrastle out a logical dispute any day, or a tough argument of one of the fathers, than refute some absurdity which fell from a pretty mouth with a smile on it.”
“Oh, I quite agree with you,” said the doctor, grinning, “that the fathers are not half such dangerous customers as the daughters.”
“Ah, go along with you, doctor!” said Father Phil, with a good-humoured laugh. “I see you are in one of your mischievous moods, and so I'll have nothing more to say to you.”
The Father turned away to join the Squire, while the doctor took a seat near Fanny Dawson and enjoyed a quiet little bit of conversation with her, while Moriarty was turning over the leaves of her album; but the brow of the captain, who affected a taste in poetry, became knit, and his lip assumed a contemptuous curl, as he perused some lines, and asked Fanny whose was the composition.
“I forget,” was Fanny's answer.
“I don't wonder,” said Moriarty; “the author is not worth remembering, for they are very rough.”
Fanny did not seem pleased with the criticism, and said that, when sung to the measure of the air written down on the opposite page, they were very flowing.
“But the principal phrase, the 'refrain'' I may say, is so vulgar,” added Moriarty, returning to the charge. “The gentleman says, 'What would you do?' and the lady answers, 'That's what I'd do.' Do you call that poetry?”
“I don't call that poetry,” said Fanny, with some emphasis on the word; “but if you connect those two phrases with what is intermediately written, and read all in the spirit of the entire of the verses, I think there is poetry in them—but if not poetry, certainly feeling.”
“Can you tolerate 'That's what I'd do'?—the pert answer of a housemaid.”