“Oh! I’m glad of that; I can tell you plenty about no end of places,” answered the traveller promptly; “but I dare say you’ve seen them all yourself; everybody goes everywhere nowadays.”
“I have never been out of Dullerton since I came here as a child, but once for a few days to London,” said Franceline; “so you can hardly go wrong in telling me about any foreign place.”
“How odd! Well, its rather refreshing too. I suppose you are nervous, afraid of the water, or the railway?”
“Not the least. I am too poor to travel.” She said it as simply as if she had stated that the rain had prevented her going for a walk.
“Oh, indeed! That is a hindrance to be sure,” blundered out Ponsonby; “but people are better off that stay at home. One is always within an inch of getting one’s neck broken, or one’s eye put out; and people very often do come to grief travelling. I dare say you wouldn’t like it at all.”
“Getting her eyes put out? I should think not!” chimed in his mother, with a mocking chuckle.
“I meant the whole thing,” pursued Ponce. “The only chance one has is to go straight through like a letter in the post, from one place to another, and stick there, and not go posting about from place to place, as we did in Rome, now. That is a pleasant place to go to. I bet anything you’d enjoy Rome awfully; everybody does; and now they’ve got good hotels, and you can get as good a dinner as any fellow need care to eat. Only you would not like the popish ways of the place. That’s the deuce of it, you can’t get out of the way of that sort of thing; it’s in the air, you see; but one grows used to it after a while, as one does to the bad smells.”
“I should not suffer from that. I am a Catholic,” said Franceline, her color rising slightly.
“Oh, indeed! I beg your pardon; I had no idea; of course that makes all the difference,” stammered the hussar, mentally comparing himself to Patrick, who could never open his mouth without putting his foot in it.
Lady Anwyll had now despatched her dinner, or as much of the long meal as she ever partook of. Feeling that the conversation was not progressing very favorably between her son and her guest, she took the reins in her own hand, and by dint of direct questions and an occasional touch of the spur she managed to make time trot on in a straggling but on the whole amusing style of talk, half narrative, half anecdote, until dinner was ended, and she and Franceline migrated to the drawing-room, leaving the captain to discuss the claret in solitary state.