"Weel, I'll no deny," said the older man, "but what it's daftlike, but if it is her leddyship's pleasure, it's nae business o' oors."
"Pleasure!" said the youth: "if she ca's this pleasure, her friends should see about shutting her up: it's time."
"She says the Romans once lived here," said John.
"If they did," Thomas said, "I daur say they had mair sinse than sit down to eat their dinner in the middle o' snaw if they had a house to tak it in."
"Her leddyship does na' tak the cauld easy," said John.
"She has the constitution o' a horse," Thomas remarked.
"Man," said John, "that shows a' that ye ken about horses: there's no a mair delicate beast on the face o' the earth than the horse. They tell me a' the horses in London hae the influenza the now."
"Weel, it'll be our turn next," said Thomas, "if we dinna tak something warm."
When luncheon was over her ladyship as often as not ordered her servants to take the carriage round by the turnpike-road to a given point, where she arranged to meet it, while she herself struck right over the hills as the crow flies, crossing the burns on her way in the same manner as the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, only the water did not stand up on each side and leave dry ground for her to tread on; but she ignored the water altogether, and walked straight through. The young ladies, knowing this, took an extra supply of stockings and shoes with them, but Lady Arthur despised such effeminate ways and drove home in the footgear she set out in. She was a woman of robust health, and having grown stout and elderly and red-faced, when out on the tramp and divested of externals she might very well have been taken for the eccentric landlady of a roadside inn or the mistress of a luncheon-bar; and probably her young footman did not think she answered to her own name at all.
There is a divinity that doth hedge a king, but it is the king's wisdom to keep the hedge close and well trimmed and allow no gaps: if there are gaps, people see through them and the illusion is destroyed. Lady Arthur was not a heroine to her footman; and when she traversed the snow-slush and walked right through the burns, he merely endorsed the received opinion that she wanted "twopence of the shilling." If she had been a poor woman and compelled to take such a journey in such weather, people would have felt sorry for her, and have been ready to subscribe to help her to a more comfortable mode of traveling; but in Lady Arthur's case of course there was nothing to be done but to wonder at her eccentricity.