“How do you like going about with a fairy?” he asked me.
“I’m not,” I said. “She’s a grown-up woman, old enough to know——”
“Worse!” he interrupted me. “She is what I call a fairy!”
“What is a fairy?” I asked, though he seemed to me very silly, and only trying to make conversation.
“A fairy is a person who always does exactly as she likes—and as other people sometimes don’t like.”
“I see,” I said, as usual, although I did not see, as usual, “just as grown-up people do.”
“But she isn’t pretty when she is old! I wonder if you will grow up a fairy? No, I think not, you don’t look as if you could tell a lie.”
“I beg your pardon,” I said. He then remarked that Lady Scilly had sent him to take me into the room where the lecture was to be given, and we went. Of course I politely tried to let age go first, but he didn’t like that, and said “Jeunesse oblige,” and “Place aux dames,” and “Juniores ad priores”—every language under the sun, winding up with that silly old story about the polite Lord Stair, who was too polite to hang back and keep the king waiting.
“Oh yes, I know that story,” I said, just to prevent him going on bothering. “It’s in Ollendorff.”
The lecture-room was quite full, and we—Lady Scilly and I—squeezed ourselves in at the back in a kind of cosy corner there was, and we were almost in the dark.