“Right you are! I pretended to Peter that it was an insane desire to kiss the baby, but I was an hour in the house before I even thought of the child. The hen was due to hatch fifteen. I interviewed her every hour, much to her disgust. At last, crack!—one came out——”
“You mean chipped the shell,” said Ariadne primly.
“Right again! I put it in a basket by the kitchen fire, the servants shunted it for dinner, it got cold, it died in the night. Yesterday five more happened, I popped them in the mild oven for a minute, just then some one pinched my baby—he screamed, and went on screaming like an electric-bell gone wrong. I had to go and look after him—cook made a blazing fire, do you see?—I have only saved five out of that brood.”
“How very funny!” said Ariadne, who wasn’t a bit amused.
I was. Christina told us of a little hen Peter had before, who had been used to be set to ducks, and who had learned to march them all down to the nearest pond. The first lot of chickens had been driven to a watery and unfamiliar death.
“Would you like to go and be photographed to-morrow?” she asked Ariadne, and Ariadne was on the qui vive at once. “They all think one an unnatural parent here, if one doesn’t take one’s brood to be perpetuated at Oldfort every year. But the trains there are so awkward for us. I am fighting the railway authorities tooth and nail, trying to persuade them to put on a slip carriage. They do it for Keiller and his marmalade, so why not for me? Say! I am on the pony’s neck! I am going to put the seat back, take the reins a minute!”
Ariadne didn’t of course like her giving them to me, but everybody always sees at once that I am the practical one.
When the seat was arranged she went bubbling on.
“Next week is our Harvest Festival and School feast, and Ball in the school-house. The gaieties of this Parish! I haven’t had tea with myself for a whole week. I am a very hard worker, you don’t know! Peter says I lie awake at nights thinking of stodgy moral books to recommend for the Village Library. I recommend some, not all, of my late patron’s, your father’s, works. The Vicar here is a dear old dodderer, and was so shocked when I recommended him The Road to Rome! It’s a book of travel, you know. We have a young man here, too, quite an eligible, he told me so. He is so shy, you see, he says the wrong thing. I wonder whether you’ll make anything of him? To a flirt, all things are possible.”
“I am not a flirt—now,” said Ariadne.