"You have perhaps heard the tragic story of Wanderslore," persisted Mr Crimble; "Miss M.'s—er—lodgings are immediately adjacent to the park."
"Hah!" repeated Mrs Monnerie, even more emphatically. "Mrs Bowater, eh? Well, I must see for myself. And I'm told, Miss M.," she swept down at me, "that you have a beautiful gift for recitation." She looked round, patted her lap imperiously, and cried, "Come, now, who's to break the ice?"
In fact, no doubt, Mrs Monnerie was not so arbitrary a mistress of Lady Pollacke's little ceremony as this account of it may suggest. But that is how she impressed me at the time. She the sun, and I the least—but I hope not the least grateful—of her obsequious planets. Lady Pollacke at any rate set immediately to breaking the ice. She prevailed upon a Miss Templemaine to sing. And we all sat mute.
I liked Miss Templemaine's appearance—brown hair, straight nose, dark eyelashes, pretty fringe beneath her peak-brimmed hat. But I was a little distressed by her song, which, so far as I could gather, was about two persons with more or less broken hearts who were compelled to part and said, "Ah" for a long time. Only physically distressed, however, for though I seemed to be shaken in its strains like a linnet in the wind, its adieux were protracted enough to enable me to examine the rest of the company at my leisure. Their eyes, I found, were far more politely engaged the while in gazing composedly down at the carpet or up at the ceiling. And when I did happen to intercept a gliding glance in my direction, it was almost as if with a tiny explosion that it collided with mine and broke away.
Mrs Monnerie's eyelids, on the other hand, with a faintly fluttering motion, remained closed from the first bar to the last—a method of appreciation I experimented with for a moment but quickly abandoned; while at the first clash of the keys, Sir Walter had dexterously contrived to slide himself out of the room by the door at which he had unexpectedly entered it on my first visit. Such was the social situation when, after murmurs of gratitude and applause, Miss Templemaine took up her gloves and rose from the piano, and Mrs Monnerie reopened herself to the outer world with the ejaculation, "That's right. Now, my dear!"
The summons was to me. My moment had come, but I was prepared for it. In my last ordeal I had broken down because I had chosen a poem that was a kind of secret thing in my mind. So, after receiving Lady Pollacke's letter, I had hunted about for a recitation as short, but less personal: one, I mean, whose sentiments I didn't mind. And since Mrs Bullace had chosen two of Mrs Browning's pieces for her triumph on New Year's Eve, I argued that she knew the parish taste, and that I could do no better. Of course, too, composure over what I was going to do was far more important than the composition.
"Prepared for it," I said just now, but I meant it only in the sense that one prepares for a cold bath. There was still the plunge. I clasped my hands, stood up. Ceiling and floor gently rocked a little. There seemed to be faces—faces everywhere, and every eye in them was fixed on me. Thus completely encompassed, I could find no refuge from them, for unfortunately my Hypnos was completely obliterated from view by the lady with the lorgnette. So I fixed my attention, instead, on the window, where showed a blank break of clear, fair, blue sky between the rain-clouds of afternoon. A nervous cough from Lady Pollacke plunged me over, and I announced my title: "The Weakest Thing," by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:—
"Which is the weakest thing of all
Mine heart can ponder?
The sun, a little cloud can pall