"Well, yes," said I, "you see, when one is listening to poetry, not reading it to oneself, I mean, one hasn't time to pry about for all its bits of meaning, but only just to get the general—general—"
"Aroma?" suggested Mrs Monnerie.
"Yes—aroma."
"And the moral?"
The silence that hung over this little exchange was growing more and more dense. Luckless Miss M.! She only plunged herself deeper into it by her reply that, "Oh, there's nothing very much in the moral, Mrs Monnerie. That's quite ordinary. At least I read about that in prose, why, before I was seven!"
"Touch—" began that further voice, but was silenced by a testy lift of Mrs Monnerie's eyelid. "Indeed!" she said, "and couldn't you, wouldn't you, now, give me the prose version? That's more my mark."
"It was in a little nursery lesson-book of mine, called The Observing Eye; letters about snails and coral insects and spiders and things——" I paused. "A book, rather, you know, for Sundays. But my—my family and I——"
"Oh, but do," cried Lady Pollacke in a voice I should hardly have recognized, "I adore snails."
Once more I was cornered. So I steeled myself anew, and stumbled through the brief passage in the squat, blue book. It tells how,—
"The history of each one of the animals we have now considered, teaches us that our kind God watches over the wants and the pleasures of the meanest of His creatures. We see that He gives to them, not only the sagacity and the instruments which they need for catching their food, but that He also provides them with some means of defending themselves. We learn by their history that the gracious Eye watches under the mighty waters, as well as over the earth, and that no creature can stop doing His will without His eye seeing it."